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CHICAGO 


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EDITORIALS THAT WON: 
ARGUMENTS THAT LIVE 




PUBLISHED BY 

THE CHICAGO HERALD COMPANY, 

156 WASHINGTON STREET. 



#' 



THE CHICAGO HERALD. 



EDITORIALS THAT WON; 

ARGUMENTS THAT LIVE. 




^6> 



PUBLISHED BY V^JiV/A 

THE CHICAGO HERALD COMPANY, 
1 56 Washington Street. 



^•A V~ 



£'•705 




Entered according' to Act of Congress, in the year 1893, by 

JAMES W. SGOTT, 

in the oflSce of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 




/ ^3 ^ 



/^3 



PUBLISHER'S NOTE. 



The great Presidential Campaign of 1892 was fought on 
the question, Is IT Constitutional or Moral to Tax 
One Freeman in the United States for the Benefit 
OF Another? 

The extraordinary answer given by the Western States 
was largely prepared by the following editorials in The 
Chicago Herald. They were written by Horatio W. 
Seymour, Managing Editor. 



CAMERON, 




AMBERC & CO. 



CHICAGO. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



Page. 

Safe Conduct to the Rear, "^ 

Hereditary Wrong, . . . 10 

Protectionism Exposed and Doomed, 14 

A Domineering Oligarchy, 1^ 

A Question of Morals ^1 

Plain Sp6ech, ^^ 

Pauperizing and Brutalizing Labor, 28 

Protectionism's Hollow Insincerity, 32 

Coining Money Out of Blood, 35 

The Misuse of Statistics, 39 

Enormous Waste of Protectionism, 43 

What Protectionism Tried to Do, .47 

Who Receives the Plunder ? ^1 

Baselessness of the Wages Lie, 54 

Monopoly-Ridden Agriculture, 58 

an 

Polite Pauperism, "* 

One Campaign Badge, . 65 

John Bull's Red Coat, ' • ^8 

Taxation and Liberty, "^^ 

Protectionism's Stupendous Bribes, 74 

Face to Face with its Promises, 77 

Honest Wealth vs. Dishonest Wealth, .... 81 

Historic Democracy and the Tariff, 85 

Republicanism and Robbery, 88 

Counting the Cost, ^1 

The Man and the Hour, ^5 

A Democrat in Earnest, . ^ .... 98 



^^. 



u 



SAFE CONDUCT TO THE REAR. 



Before the beginning of hostilities in time of war it is custom- 
ary for civilized people to give strangers not in sympathy with 
them safe conduct beyond the lines. 

The time is now at hand when the democratic party must grap- 
ple with the most gigantic wrong of the age. Its position as to the 
question of protective tariffs has been authoritatively pronounced 
by the national convention. The party, pledged no less by tra- 
dition and history and fundamental belief than by the platform 
adopted at Chicago in June, is for free trade. It is not for trade 
that is taxed a little in the interest of monopoly any more than it is 
for trade that staggers almost to destruction under taxes piled 
mountain high in the interest of a privileged class. It is for trade 
that is wholly and absolutely free from protective taxes large or 
small, for trade that is open to all on equal terms, and for trade 
that shall bear no tax burden at all save that which may be imposed 
for revenue. 

The existing tariff, the most monstrous abuse of the taxing 
power ever known to a free people, is not for revenue ; it is for 
plunder. The government's share of the imposition is incidental 
and comparatively insignificant. The chief aim of its authors was 
to reduce revenue and increase the profits of monopoly. Against 
this barbarous law which has robbed and degraded American labor 
and filled every honest man's heart with a lively sense of the 
wrong done to him and the danger that threatens to his country, 
the democratic party is arrayed honestly and fearlessly, with no 
misgivings and with no equivocations. 

A tariff for revenue only is free trade— the only sort of free 
trade that the world has ever known. A tariff for revenue only is 
a tariff that gives thieves, liars and confidence men, bilks, malin- 
gerers andtriflers, incompetents, drones and lazzaroni, bribe-givers, 

7 



8 SAFE CONDUCT TO THE REAR. 

fat fryers and bounty beggars absolutely nothing. If they do 
business they do business as other men do— as honest men do. If 
they make and ofier anything for sale they must depend on their 
own sagacity and on the character of their product to find a pur- 
chaser—as honest men do. If they are capable of earning a 
living they will live as honest men do— not by the sweat of other 
men's brows, but by their own exertions. If they are incapable 
of making a living without robbing their neighbor they will go 
hungry and naked— as many better men than they have done and 
will do until the end of time. A tariff for revenue only in this 
country to-day would be the most striking manifestation of na- 
tional obedience to the divine command, "Thou shalt not steal." 

It may be that there are men calling themselves democrats who 
cannot or will not subscribe to this high resolve. Perhaps some of 
them are dishonestly taking toll from their fellow men. Perhaps 
others are misguided and ignorant. It is possible that still others, 
knowing the truth, but mistakenly anxious for party success at 
any sacrifice, do not believe in risking all on a principle when in 
their estimation an expedient of some sort would answer every 
purpose. If so, the time has now come when all such should be 
given safe conduct to the rear. 

Democracy has been clearly enough defined. He who runs may 
read. It will take no step backward. The man who is not for free 
trade is against democracy. The man who quibbles, the man who 
mouths platitudes about incidental protection, is against democracy. 
The question has passed beyond the bounds of expediency. It is 
a political question in a sense, but not wholly so. In a wider view 
it is a moral question. Being a moral question, the right must 
prevail, and when the accumulated wrath of the people shall break 
upon the strongholds of robbery, little robbers as well as big rob- 
bers will be put to flight. Percentages will cut no figure then. 
The man who took 5 per cent, will go along with the man who 
took 50 per cent. The oppressors of a few and the oppressors of 
many will find themselves in the same dock, convicted of the same 
crime and sentenced to the same penalty. 

Thus clearly outlined, there should be no question from this 
time on as to the meaning and purpose of democracy. The party 



SAFE OONDUGT TO TEE REAR. 9 

is about to move forward. Let him who would turn back, turn 
back. If there are so called leaders who doubt or hesitate, let 
them give place to braver and honester men. If there are cow- 
ards or knaves who long for the flesh pots of monopoly, let them 
have a safe conduct beyond the lines. In unity is strength. With- 
out unity, devotion, singleness of purpose and an unflinching 
determination to root out and destroy this tariff infamy, nothing 
can be accomplished. 

Let the so-called democratic tariff straddlers and dodgers in 
the west take notice, therefore. This is to be a movement for free 
trade. The democrat who by tongue or pen seeks to qualify or 
limit the purpose of the party to destroy protection root and branch 
and to expose and punish the thieves and liars who have profited 
by it at the expense of the people, will save himself and his party 
much needless trouble by passing over to the camp of the enemy 
now ! 



HEREDITARY WRONG. 



The tariff abomination in this country has been discussed on 
existing lines long enough. Discussion of a moral question is use- 
ful if the main point be not lost sight of, but there comes a time in 
every movement against incorrigible wrong and wrong doers when 
argument avails no longer. After a case against a habitual crimi- 
nal. has been made up, after all of the pleas and counter-pleas have 
been entered, after the jury, fully instructed, has solemnly 
weighed the testimony and agreed upon a verdict, which even the 
culprit knows is against him, judgment and execution are in order. 
The American people are fully informed as to this tariff crimioal. 
They know that he steals. They know that he lies. They know 
that he is desperate. They know that nothing is to be gained by 
appeals to his conscience or to his sense of justice. They know 
that he is a scoundrel who is at war with society and that his 
crimes will not cease until he shall have been exterminated. 

When the question of human slavery had been discussed in 
every conceivable phase for more than a generation it was found 
that that monstrous error was incurable. It could not be reformed. 
It could not be circumscribed. It could not be rendered harmless. 
It could not be modified. It could not be concealed. Convicted. 
in the high court of reason, it sought refuge in one lie after another 
until at last, with a savage last-ditch obstinacy, it threw off' all 
disguises and, appealiug to the sword, it perished by the sword. 

Slavery was a hereditary wrong. So is protection. The gener- 
ation that is now oppressing the American people under the cover 
of the tariff was reared to the privilege. The right to rob has been 
handed down from fathers who had shame-faced excuses for their 
system to misguided sons who never knew anything else and who 
believe that it is right for one man to tax other men. No sane 
person imagines that these hereditary beneficiaries of wrong-doing 
can be won over by argument or by appeals to reason and 

10 



HEREDITARY WRONG^ 11 

conscience. They have been born to monopoly. They drank it in 
with their mother's milli. It was nourished in them by fatherly 
counsel, precept and admonition. They cannot be made to yield 
by persuasion or by threats. They will argue gladly until dooms- 
day, and, if they weary of the iteration of falsehood and folly, they 
have money wrung from the people with which to hire attorneys 
and newspapers to take up the strain where they leave off. While 
argument is prolonged the thieving continues. They do not fear 
abstractions. They do fear action. 

The slavery evil was argued exactly as the tariff evil has been 
argued. Its crafly defenders were ready in every political cam- 
paign with some new trick or falsehood on which the energies of 
the people were wasted. In the beginning slavery was an admitted 
wrong which could not be denounced because its beneficiaries wei e 
brother Americans and brother patriots. It was generally admitted 
that it would have to go — some time. Then it was a domestic 
institution which did not concern outsiders. Then it was a good 
thing for the north because it kept the south out of competition 
with it in manufacturing pursuits. Then it became a great thing 
for the negro because it took him from savagery and civilized and 
christianized him. Then it was found that it was a freeman's 
birthright ; next, that the integrity of the state depended upon it ; 
next, that its destruction would endanger business interests; next, 
that its opponents were anarchists ; next, that it was a divine 
institution, sanctioned by holy writ which was duly quoted ; next, 
that a slave-owner was as good as ten "yankees" and that as all 
past compromises were illegal, they should be wiped out and a man 
should not onl}- go where he pleased with his "niggers," but other 
men should hunt them down when they escaped and return them 
to him ; next, that freedom meant a bloody race war and the anni- 
hilation of the whites ; and lastly, that the mere agitation of the 
question was calculated to incite a servile insurrection and was 
therefore ample justification for war. 

During this period of discussion and entreaty there were com- 
promises and modifications of various sorts, but the evil remained 
and at the first opportunity the slaveocracy, made savage by oppo- 
sition and defying all restraint, repealed them, threw defiance in 



12 HEREDITARY WRONG. 

the face of the north by passing the fugitive slave law and then 
prepared for another century of talk— and sla\»ery. But the mat- 
ter had passed beyond the range of argument and technicality and 
sophistry and falsehood. The great crime stood face to face with 
nineteenth century civilization and one or the other had to go. 
The tariff crime has gone through all these stages of defense and 
evasion. The tariff compromise of 1883 was a slight concession 
made at the suggestion of cautious men for the purpose of appeas- 
ing popular wrath, just as the Missouri compromise was agreed to 
for a similar purpose sixty years before. Yet— such was the futil- 
ity of argument — the first sweeping republican victory thereafter 
was followed by the enactment of the tariff's fugitive slave law 
which bears the name of McKinley. That law was monopoly's 
defiance, just as the fugitive slave law was slavery's defiance. It 
was intended to fortify a colossal wrong and at the outset no effort 
was made by its desperate and dogged authors to justify it. The 
falsehoods, the tricks and the "scares" that are now resorted to 
in its defense are chiefly the inventions of the fools and dupes who 
want an excuse for wrong-doing. The prime movers in the vil- 
lainy, intrenched behind bought laws, bought newspapers, cor- 
rupted officials, and a debauched electorate, are secure against 
everything but action on the part of the honest men of America. 
They do not fear discussion of percentages. They mock at morals. 
They can find more mare's nests than anybody else. They can get 
up more alarms. They can produce more lying figures. They can 
argue and steal indefinitely. But of one thing let every intelligent 
man be assured : iSo long as the American people are content to 
pursue this question on the lines laid down by monopoly itself, 
monopoly will be secure. 

Thanks to the courageous and honest utterance of the national 
democratic convention, the one mandate that these liars and thieves 
fear has gone forth. Protectionism has been tried, convicted and 
condemned. It is incorrigible. It has retreated into the last ditch. 
Like a tiger at bay, like slavery at bay, it cannot safely be reasoned 
with or exhorted. It will not, it cannot reform. It cannot be 
modified. It will not, it cannot restore to an afflicted people the 
millions that it has stolen or the lives that it has taken. It must 



HEBEDITABT WRONG. 13 

be dispatched. There is neither safety nor wisdom in parleys or 
treaties. It deserves no consideration. It has sacrificed all claims 
to compassion. From now on there should be no question as to 
the fixed and unalterable purpose of the democratic party to 
destroy utterly this monstrous wrong. 

Protectionism has raised in this country the red flag of anarchy, 
the yellow flag of plague and the black flag of starvation. Let the 
democratic party, relying confidently upon the intelligence and the 
virtue of the people, inscribe "No Quarter" on its banners, and, 
pledged to the repeal of every law that taxes one man for the bene- 
fit of another, let it give protectionism clearly to understand that 
this is to be a fight to the death. 



PROTECTIONISM EXPOSED AND DOOMED. 



If an offender ever was exposed, all his craft uncovered, all his 
sneaking arts laid bare, all his contemptible lies revealed, and all 
his wretched evasions explained and accounted for, the monopoly 
tariff is that offender. The assumptions of protectionism are all 
false, all baseless, all dishonest, all impudent. It is because the 
American people are convinced of these things that the whole 
system has been sentenced to death. An institution that is sup. 
ported by lies cannot be praiseworthy. 

There was a time when, if the slave-owners of the south had 
been willing to admit that their system was wrong and that it was 
an affront to nineteenth century civilization, they might have 
procured a hundred years' lease of life for it by keeping its in- 
famies within bounds and sparing mankind the infliction of its 
intolerable encroachments. But such a thing came at last to be 
impossible. Led on by audacious men filled with the lust of 
power, hosts of the smaller slave-owners and multitudes who 
owned no slaves at all were hurried into a position from which 
nothing but a successful war could rescue them and their cause. 
Their war did not succeed and their cause perished. 

Time was when the protected interests in this country, with a 
few reasonable concessions to public opinion, might have so 
ordered matters that they could have retained their peculiar abuse 
for a generation longer. But the spirit of concession was not in 
them. The same infernal greed, the same devilish desire for polit- 
ical and commercial power that lured the slave-owners to ruin 
beckoned them also to destruction. The time came when the 
assumptions of the slave-owners were not compatible with 
American freedom and self-respect — when they became a menace 
to society at large — and from that moment compromises with 
slavery were impossible. The institution was doomed. So also 
the lime has come when the claims of the tariff monopolists are not 

14 



PROTECTIONISM EXPOSED AND DOOMED. 15 

to be entertained by any man worthy the name of freeman, for they 
are at war with the fundamentals of American liberty and their 
further extension can be compassed only by the sacrifice of prin- 
ciples dear to every loyal heart. That institution is likewise 
doomed. 

In the first instance, the protective tariff, like slavery, was 
regarded as a necessary evil. The men who were to profit by it 
were quite willing to have it so considered. It was excused one 
hundred years ago on the plea that it was desirable to protect 
infant industries, though most of the industries thus protected 
were as lusty even then as any of like nature anywhere in the 
world. Not a word was then said about tariffs being necessary to 
protect labor. 

There never has been a time from the days of Plymouth Rock 
to the days of Lower Quarantine in New York Bay when labor was 
not much better paid iu this country than in Europe. It was true 
before an American tariff bill existed. It was true before independ- 
ence. It was true after independence, and one of the reasons why 
the men who were conducting infant industries in 1790 asked a 
little protection was the fact that they were compelled to pay 
higher wages than Europeans and should therefore have govern- 
ment assistance. If at that time any man had had the effrontery 
to say that he wanted a protective tariff because he desired to pay 
higher wages he would have been hooted out of congress for the 
fool and knave that his words would have shown him to be. 
Nothing was heard of the wages lie until twenty-five years later, 
and not much was heard of it until nearly a hundred years later. 

When the infant industry idea palled on the public mind— when 
the people began to weary of paying tribute to support the 40-year- 
old infants, whose parents even then essayed the roles of bosses 
and superior beings— it was suddenly discovered by the attorneys 
of the thieving propaganda that the tariff was the "American" 
system. The fine irony of this misnomer of a scheme as old as 
human oppression— as ancient as robbery in any form and of a sort 
particularly affected by pirates and monarchs reigning by divine 
right in semi-barbarous empires— was not at first apparent to the 



16 PROTECTIONISM EXPOSED AND DOOMED. 

American whose exuberant patriotism was thus cleverly played 
upon. 

When the scales did fall from his eyes he was regaled with 
glowing accounts of the wonderful home market that protection 
created and maintained for him. In fact, the home market became 
the one great object of the tariff exactly as in former times that 
object had been the fostering of infant industries and the pro- 
motion of Americanism. As the home market fallacy began to 
vanish into thin air the wages lie, the most obstinate and unkill- 
able of all the lies that Beelzebub and his angels ever fathered, yet 
the most palpable lie, the lie most easily detected, the lie that had 
the most shadowy foundation that a lie ever had and the lie that 
has been choked down a thousand scoundrels' throats only to 
reappear in some new form— this wages lie was invented, and for 
a season the tariff that had once been called into existence to foster 
infant industries at 6 per cent ; that had promoted Americanism at 
25 per cent ; that had safeguarded the home market at 40 per cent, 
began business as the tutelary god of labor at anywhere from 50 to 
60 per cent. 

Later on, when even this inconceivably brutal and baseless lie 
was exposed and when McKinley had added his scorpions to the 
scourge with which monopoly was lashing American industry, it 
was proclaimed that protective tariffs not only made wages high in 
this country but that they made prices low, and a little later still, 
in order to cover a new point, it was authoritatively handed down 
that the tariff made the prices of manufactured goods low, but that 
it increased the prices of farm products. 

These are the differing claims of a criminal brought to bay at 
different times, every one of which is at war with some of the 
others. These are the cheap and shallow lies, contradictory and 
self- convicting in every case, with which the American people 
have been deluded from the beginning. These are the attenuated 
excuses under cover of which three generations of freemen have 
been systematically plundered. These are specimen bricks from 
the temple of sophistry and falsehood from which this odious doc- 
trine has gone forth, as from one speaking with authority, for more 
than one hundred years. Shameful, is it not, that preoccupation;. 



PROTECTIONISM EXPOSED AND DOOMED. 17 

ignorance, self-deceit and greed, ever with an eye on the main 
chance, should have led an enlightened people on and on through 
this maze of deception until now the barriers erected about it 
seem almost insurmountable ? 

Yet, thanks to the avarice of the privileged class itself, thanks 
to the undisguised ravening of the pampered horde in and about 
the McKinley congress, thanks to the easy assurance of the knaves 
who fatten on the substance of the people, thanks to the con- 
fessions of a thousand villains who in their eager quest for wealth 
have publicly displayed their own blackheartedness and thanks 
to the contradictions and stultifications of ten thousand liars, the 
great infamy is at last exposed. The eyes of Americans are on 
these wretches. It is now seen that the evil to be dealt with is of 
no ordinary scope. It is seen that a system which corrupts 
congresses and courts, debauches voters, bribes newspapers, 
advocates force bills, bestows the people's money lavishly in 
largesses which bewilder and intoxicate the ignorant and vicious, 
is altogether wrong and in every respect dangerous. It is seen 
that the time when it might have been reformed has gone by. It 
is known that it is incurable. Too savage to be compromised 
with, too desperate to be reached by friendly entreaty, too 
thoroughly indurated to crime to be amenable to anything but 
heroic treatment, it must be destroyed root and branch. 

The protective tariff makes war upon every honest industry 
and every principle of republican government. The people must 
make war upon it if they would preserve and rehabilitate this 
republic. Privilege and democracy cannot exist side by side. If 
this is a democracy the doctrine that a small class of men may 
prey upon a larger class of men has no place here. In the utter 
destruction of that theory, which must speedily be brought about, 
none but the guilty will suffer. 



A DOMINEERING OLIGARCHY. 



The protective tariff is to be utterly destroyed because, like 
slavery, it has established in this republic a domineering oligarchy, 
which, assuming sovereignty in some things, encroaches at all 
points upon prerogatives that belong to the government alone. 

Things came to such a pass in the days of slavery that no legis- 
lation on any subject could be entered upon unless the slave 
oligarchy were taken into account. It had established here a 
power that was co-equal in some respects with that of the govern- 
ment itself. So now the tariff oligarchy rules this country, and 
born Americans who go to Washington and with uplifted hand 
swear solemnly to support the republic and its laws hasten to make 
their peace with this despotic power and straightway enter into its 
service and forget their oaths. 

The tariff oligarchy rules this land. At its order taxes, prices, 
industries, politicians, rise or fall. At its command public expend- 
itures increase or decrease. It fills the treasury or it empties it. 
Its interests determine every policy adopted. Not a bill of any 
importance ever reaches the president of the United States for sig- 
nature that has not at some stage received the approval of this 
odious power. Pensions, public improvements, bounties, subsidies, 
silver legislation— all of the things with which congress concerns 
itself— represent no longer the ascertained will or the undoubted 
interests of the people. They indicate and measure the bargains 
and bribes that Tariff has been able to effectuate. 

This tariff oligarchy, like the slave oligarchy, is a compact 
power based upon consuming greed and depending upon the ignor- 
ance, the preoccupation or the delusion of the people for its success. 
Like the slave oligarchy also, it lends itself most naturally to the 
support of vicious causes, for, as the history of all criminals shows, 
an alliance between companions in crime, either one of whom can 
convict the other, is likely to be closer than any other relation 

18 



A DOMINEERING OLIGARCHY. 19 

known among men. The man having a wicked scheme to promote 
reckons no more with the people, but with Tariff. If Tariff finds in 
it an opportunity to attach a congressional district or a state to its 
following Tariff assents, and the bill becomes a law. If there is 
nothing in a measure for Tariff, it dies, because, no matter how 
meritorious it may be. Tariff rules this land ! Its voice is the voice 
of authority to-day ! 

So slavery ruled the republic at one time. After the southern 
oligarchy took up its position in the democratic party no man who 
did not approve of slavery could receive the democratic nomi- 
nation for president. So, now that Tariff has taken up its position 
in the republican part}-, no man can receive the republican nom- 
ination for president who does not first of all subscribe to every 
degrading dogma of TariiT. Tariff reigns. The people rule no 
longer. TariflTs interests alone are consulted. The people's inter- 
ests, if noticed at all, are at first reviled and finally ignored. 

We are threatened with national bankruptcy on account of the 
most corrupt pension system known to mankind since the rottenest 
days of Rome. Why ? Because Tariff is glad to debauch the peo- 
ple whom it is impoverishing. We are almost on the brink of the 
cheap silver money precipice, at the bottom of which lie national 
dishonor and individual ruin. Why ? Because Tariff is hastening 
to the support of a misguided faction which pays the price by sup- 
porting Tariff. We are menaced by a force bill which will make 
our elections a farce and perpetuate the rule of a single party. 
Why ? Because Tariff has grown weary of buying elections. We 
have our Dudleys. Dorseys and Quays with their blocks of five, our 
Wanamakers with their big corruption funds and their purchased 
seats in the cabinet, our MeKinley law, bought in advance by the 
men who hare grown rich under it, our partisan judges like Woods, 
who gain promotion b}' protecting political knavery, our muzzled 
republican newspapers and our gagged republican leaders. Why ? 
Because Tariff rules — because the people are subject to a power 
that governs in their name but not in their interest. 

This taritT oligarchy, like the slave oligarchy, is not formidable 
by reason of the numbers that compose it. It is made up of com 
paratively few men. It is powerful because of the numbers that 



20 A DOMINEERING OLIQARCIIY. 

it deludes, the numbers that it silences and the numbers that it 
involves with itself in crime, A hundred men plunged the south 
into the bloody rebellion war. The mass of the people were for 
the union until the very eve of hostilities. Thousands of small 
slave-owners and thousands of others who owned no slaves at all 
were opposed to disunion. War itself was the only thing that made 
the slave oligarchy's last stupendous crime possible. It was the 
slave oligarchy that fired upon Sumter. It knew what was needed 
to precipitate matters and it did not hesitate to pull the trigger. 

So now with the tariff oligarchy. A hundred lawless men are 
the chief beneficiaries of the wrongs which, by playing upon the 
greed and the prejudices of some portions of the people, it has 
fastened upon all of the people. Thousands who imagined that 
they were benefited by slavery were oppressed by it, as they have 
since confessed. Thousands who have been taught that they could 
not do business without Tariff are fettered and robbed by it. The 
petty stealings tliat come to their tills, and which they see, are as 
nothing in comparison with the steady drain upon their resources 
for the benefit of the prime movers in the iniquity which they do 
not see. If slavery could have been abolished without war the 
process would have injured few men. It would have destroyed a 
coterie of lordly aristocrats, but the mass of slave-owners them- 
selves, under new and better conditions, would have profited by the 
change. So also the abolition of Tariff would injure no man save 
those who have assumed airs of political, social and commercial 
superiority that should not be tolerated in a country whose boast 
is the equality of its people. 

Tariff stands, as slavery stood, ever with a bribe in one hand to 
entice weak men to its side. Tariff stands, as slavery stood, ever 
with a bludgeon in the other hand to intimidate cowardly men into 
its service. It is not a thing that the masses of the people are 
attached to. It is an oligarchy composed of a few swollen scound- 
rels who rule by bribery, by deception, by intimidation, by lies, by 
fraud. Destroy the institution under which they have gained this 
iniquitous power and they only will suffer, while all oihers, relieved 
of an incubus that has sapped the life and virtue of the nation, will 
bound forward to new conquests in commerce, industry and liberty. 



A QUESTION OF MORALS. 



The root of the taritf abomination is the taxation of one man 
for the benefit of another man. Equivocate and falsify as the ad- 
vocates of this robber propaganda ma}', that is the object that every 
rascal among them has in view. That is the vested right of which 
we hear so much. That is the business interest that is said to be 
threatened. 

Stealing is a vulgar enough crime. Does it become more respect- 
able when it is endorsed by an entire political party, when great 
newspapers and great names lend their moral support lo it, and 
when even preachers are content to remain speechless in its pres- 
ence ? There is no occasion for self-deception here. The protec- 
tive tariff stands as the most abhorrent work of a government of 
thieves, by thieves, for thieves. Sooner or later the conscience of 
the nation must revolt against it. 

This thieving tariff school has turned the world upside down 
with its clamorous lies. It has justified robbery and sought to fix 
the brand of infamy upon the victims thereof. It has glorified 
thieves and stigmatized the people who have dared to enter a pro- 
test. It has fallen down and worshiped riches, every dollar of 
which was plunder. It has set up its deities of copper, of iron, of 
steel, of wood, of tin, of glass, and of coal, and, denyingthetrue God, 
it has impiously commanded all Americans to bend the knee to 
them. In the service of robbery it has appropriated to its own use 
the vocabulary of virtue. On its lying tongue words have lost their 
meaning. It has made right wrong, it has sent truth into disgrace 
branded as falsehood, and Justice it has scourged out of her 
temple where shame sits in state. 

Here is a moral question worthy the attention of every honest 
man. Here is a moral question that must be settled and settled 
right at no distant day if this country is to remain a republic in 
anything but name. With all men equal ^efore the law, we are 

21 



22 A QUESTION OF MORALS. 

already divided iiitc two classes — the one that robs and the one 
that is robbed. Because this infamy has been successfully prac- 
ticed for a generation, is there a citizen infatuated enough to think 
it can last forever ? Do the intelligent and the moral men of Amer- 
ica, who for one reason or another have winked at this atrocity, 
imagine that it can end in anything but disaster? 

With such an example as Tariflf thus sets before the young, no. 
one need be surprised if the coming generation of Americans shall 
develop the most colossal scoundrelism that the world has ever 
known. Every lamp set for the feet of our youth by the fathers 
of the republic has been extinguished by this graceless crew. All 
the landmarks are down, all the guideposts removed. We are now 
teaching inequality instead of equality. We are showing how 
much better it is to be dishonest, unjust and rich than it is to be 
honest, just and poor. We are holding up our government as a 
thing to be robbed or a robber to be enlisted on our side when we 
set out on our forays against our fellow men. We no longer draw 
inspiration from the heroes who taught equal and exact justice 
and who bequeathed us a republic that was to be always the best 
hope of mankind. The constitution we have flouted, the golden 
rule we have forgotten, the decalogue we have relegated to the 
garret and the admonitions of our elders we have laughed at as we 
have turned lightly in pursuit of the golden bait held out by the 
perjured wretches who have made privilege and plunder their 
watchwords. 

What do we say to the youth about to enter upon the serious 
business of life ? Do we tell him that success is to be reached only 
by perseverance, frugality and industry ? Not at all. We point 
to a shorter cut. Go to congress and beg or buy a law that will 
enable you to tax your neighbor. Do we say to the aspiring boy 
that to succeed he must deserve success ? We do not. We point to 
the men who have grown powerful on privilege and we say to him : 
Get a bounty or a subsidy or an appropriation. Do we hold up 
scrupulous honesty and undeviating justice as the things most to 
be desired and most likely to lead to fortune ? Never. We say to 
the lads of our day: Seek out some unfair and unjust advantage 
by means of a wicked law and then get rich quickly. No matter 



A QUESTION OF MORALS. 28 

if you do have to bribe and bully your way to success. Who 
cares ? You will have plenty of company, and if you are a smart 
thief you will find numerous dull but influential thieves who will 
assist you. Do we refer the young man who aspires to political 
honors to the lives and precepts of the stalwart heroes who made 
the republic known and honored around the world ? No. Our 
present system says to him as plainly as words can frame a 
thought : Never mind the old men ; they were antiquated and 
slow. Take off your hat to some selfish interest. Prove your ca- 
pacity to serve King Iron, King Coal, King Copper, King Glass 
and King Lumber ; accept their bribe, and then, with their cash 
in your pocket and a lie upon your lips, go before the people 
whom you are to delude and betray ! 

That is the lesson that America is teaching to-day, while our 
pulpits are silent and one-half of our newspapers are bribed or 
muzzled. Is this a course to be pursued indefinitely ? Is it a pol- 
icy which we are to champion and if possible to extend ? The pul- 
pit south was not more timid in the presence of Slavery than is the 
pulpit north in the atmosphere of Tariffl This later bondage is 
intellectual as well as physical and moral. It has darkened many 
minds which should have seen clearly. In all this countr}- there 
are not a dozen preachers who have uttered a word against a sin 
that has become national and whose eflfects are world-wide. Do 
these silenced moralists believe that their cowardice is unnoticed? 
Will they much longer have the hurdihood to search out and at- 
tack with tremendous oratorical flourish some little vice while this 
colossal infamy stalks up and down the land unscathed ? 

Honest men everywhere have an interest in this question which 
transcends any mere partyism. Triumphant wrong never has 
challenged the attention of mankind without awakening a spirit 
that proved unconquerable. This tariff wrong which makes 
evil its good and which proclaims iniquity as its highest and 
noblest aspiration, has deliberately invited destruction. Let the 
people whose intelligence and virtue it has underestimated come 
together regardless of past differences and, with invincible pur- 
pose, pursue it to the death. 



PLAIN SPEECH. 



True words are likely to be plain words, and plain words some- 
times shock honest men almost as much as they do thieves and 
villains. It is always easy to drift with the current, and it be- 
comes easier still as the waters near the precipice. The privileged 
classes in America are opposed to plain speech because they have 
everything to lose and nothing to gain by it. 

It would be highly gratifying to the protected interests if the 
American people would always take the trouble to speak of them 
as "our infant industries." They would like to have a certain 
governmental policy in which they are deeply interested called the 
"fostering of domestic manufactures." They would like to have 
the vulgar word " tax " removed from the dictionary and "free 
trade " they would serve in the same way if it would not agree to 
masquerade under the more polite guise of " tariff reform." 
When a family has enjoyed the privilege of taxing other men for 
a generation or two it becomes highly refined and sensitive. Any- 
thing that is harsh or earnest grates upon its sensibilities. Euphe- 
misms it will tolerate, but plain words are positively too rude for 
delicate ears. 

No privileged class ever yet mounted to luxury and ease with- 
out carrying with it more or less of the respect which success, 
even of the dubious sort, usually commands. The tariff lords 
of America are no exception to the rule. The ties of society, of 
good fellowship, of politics and of the church are strong, and 
plain speech that tends to disturb them is likely to be reprobated 
by men who themselves may have nothing to fear from it. There 
is an element also in every society that always stands in dread of 
change ; that is timid almost to the point of cowardice and that is 
forever expostulating with the sincere, restraining the courageous, 
rebuking the bold and entreating the determined to be cautious. 

24 



PLAIN SPEECH. 35 

Every moral or political revolution of which we have any record 
has had first to deal with this repressive influence on the part of good 
men, to say nothing of the more brutal manifestations of dislike 
on the part of the vicious and the ignorant. The brickbats and the 
bludgeons of the mob are less disheartening to a man who has 
justice on his side than the indifference or the timidity of the pre- 
tended friend. The rabble that jeers to-day will cheer to-morrow, 
but the man who knows the truth and who will confidentially 
acknowledge it, but who hesitates about boldly proclaiming it, 
may be looked for on the side of error when the final and inevit- 
able separation shall take place. 

The movement against the great crime of protection has gone 
through all of these preliminary stages. It has encountered the 
idiot's laugh, the fool's jest, the knave's leer and the coward's 
stare. It has overcome the good man's doubt, the timid man's 
frown, the church's indifference and society's pretty consternation. 
It has prevailed against the trimmer's flight, the trickster's lie, the 
deserter's retreat and the scoundrel's cool defiance. No trifle can 
stop it now. These years of discussion and preparation have not 
been wasted. They have given time for the rearrangement of 
parties, for the realignment of forces. If from one side there 
have been drawn the men who yield easily to the blandishments of 
power and wealth there have come from the other a greater num- 
ber who respect truth and revere justice. The separation of the 
sheep from the goats has been a tedious but a necessary process. 

In the shock of opposing ideas that is to follow plain words 
only will have either fitness or eff'ect. We taught in the case of 
the slave-owners that the man who held another in bondage and 
appropriated his labor to his own use was a robber. Let us apply 
that lesson now to the thieves who by law appropriate as their own 
a portion of the labor of their fellow men. A law that enables 
one man to exact from another any coutribution of money or of 
toil for which no equivalent is given is a violation of that section 
of the constitution which forever prohibits domestic slavery. A 
farmer who gives forty bushels of wheat for a coat when thirty 
would buy the same garment in a free market is robbed of ten 
bushels, and the time that he spent in growing that ten bushels 



26 PLAIN SPEECH. 

was passed in servitude. Wlien slavery was abolished there was 
neither moral nor legal distinction between the man who owned 
five slaves and the man who owned five hundred slaves. So 
now the man who commands the unrequited services of other men 
for one-fifth or one-tenth of their time is as plainly a robber as the 
Arab man stealers in Africa who command such services for all 
time. 

This is the crime of which protectionism stands accused. The 
question involved is not a complex one, though it has been made 
to appear so by the subterfuges of its beneficiaries. If a thief's 
hand is in your pocket, you know him to be a thief, and no amount 
of stuffed reports and lying statistics that he may produce tending 
to show that pious men always get their hands into other men's 
pockets will deceive you in the least. If a sneak seizes your 
watch and runs and when caught challenges you to give the num- 
ber of the timepiece or the maker's name, you do not consider him 
any the less a thief even though he may prove to the officer and 
the gaping crowd that you do not know the maker or ihe number 
of your watch. If a man who tells you plainly that he is a thief, 
and that he intends to make a living by theft, is apprehended with 
stolen goods in his possession, and then declares that he took the 
valuables with the idea of replacing them with something better 
or of bestowing them upon the poor, you know him to be not 
only a thief but a liar. If you are invited into a high mountain 
by an individual who points to the beauties of field and forest, to 
the waving grain and the nodding corn, to the glad sunlight and the 
health-giving springs, and who says: "Behold my handiwork," 
you rebuke him in wrath, for you know him to be the devil, the 
great father of all lies. 

The protective tariff is to be judged by its primary object, the 
object which nobody denied when it was first instituted. That ob- 
ject was and is the taxation of one man for the benefit of another 
man. We know that to be thievery. Let us call it thievery. 
This thievery is now defended by the impudent assertion that it is 
beneficial to all, by the declaration that it raises wages, by the 
claim that it rests only on the foreigner, by the contention that it 
makes things cheap, and finally by the infamous blasphemy that 



PLAIN SPEECH. 27 

but for this unjust system we would have no prosperity and no 
happiness. We know all this to be a lie. Let us call it a lie. 

We shall lose some friends by plain speech, but we will gain 
many others. The supporters of this detestable wrong do not fear 
generalities. They will argue everj^ point but the main point. 
Their lies they will discuss, but their theft they will not discuss. 
Let us hold them to it. Plain speech is necessary to batter down 
the walls of sophistry, falsehood and euphemy that have been 
thrown around this great central crime. Expose that shameful in- 
justice to the world and it will go as slavery did, followed by the 
execrations of mankind. 



PAUPERIZING AND BRUTALIZING LABOR. 



This degrading tariff system is destroying the self-reliance of 
the American people as surely as it is corrupting our youth and 
polluting our politics. 

If there is pauper labor anywhere on earth it is to be found 
here in the United States, where it has been pauperized by the 
debasing practices of protection. We not only receive hundreds 
of thousands of pauper immigrants each year, but we maintain an 
institution here which teaches these new-comers immediately on 
their arrival that they are to receive high wages because the govern- 
ment taxes other workingmen, most of them born here, for their 
support. The helpless children of oppression at home, they gladly 
accept this condition of pauperism here, and if the thief who 
stands between them and the government fulfilled his part of the 
contract there would be no complaint from the people thus pauper- 
ized. It is not until they discover that the thief does not bestow 
upon them in alms the plunder that he takes from American 
citizens that they revolt. 

In the self-respecting days of American labor how many work- 
ingmen could have been obtained for service in a shop or mill that 
announced its incapacity to pay the ruling rate of wages unless it 
were given the right to assess the people at large for the purpose ? 
What proud-spirited American mechanic would have taken the 
dirty dollars that any lying thief of this description might have 
offered him? Let the answer be read in the protected labor camps 
of this country to-day, where "American laborers" are known not 
by name but by number and where a man with a pronounceable 
name or an English tongue is so rare an object as to occasion 
remark. 

In the offscourings of the worn-out despotisms of the old world 
the tariff lords of America found exactly the material that they 
wanted to make pauper labor of and to fashion into voters who 

38 



PAUPERIZING AND BRUTALIZING LABOR. 29 

would assist them in fastening their detestable system upon better 
men. Accustomed to caste and privilege and snobbery and in- 
justice at home and unacquainted with the independence that once 
characterized American workingmen, these wretches fell easily 
into the trap set for them, and, voting protection ballots that they 
could not read, they became instruments in the hands of villains 
to extend the accursed oppression of medieval Europe over a 
people that had once been virtuous enough to throw it off. 

American labor has been driven in despair from the shops and 
mines to the farms, where it is defiantly taxed ostensibly to enable 
our Carnegies to pay big wages to the Bulgarians and Scythians in 
their employ, but really to swell Carnegie's bank account and en- 
able him to astonish two hemispheres with the prodigality of his 
expenditure. That is where the true American labor is and that is 
what it is doing. The more highly protected the industry the 
fewer Americans will be found in it. The man who prates loudest 
of American labor has the closest relations with the swarming 
thousands at quarantine. The interest that professes the gravest 
apprehension of a "flood of pauper-made goods" is most likely to 
preside over a starvation camp where no English is spoken, where 
human beings live like savages and where no American idea save 
that of taxing one man for the benefit of another man ever takes 
root. This "protected" labor is the true pauper labor of the worM 
and it is positively the only pauper labor to be found anywhere on 
earth outside of the almshouse. 

Until they have been here long enough to discover the truth 
these pauperized importations regard each new tax levy by the 
tariff" barons in the same light that the inmates of a workhouse 
view an increased appropriation by the county board. They do 
not get the plunder but they think they do, and the moral effect is ex- 
actly the same. To the extent that protectionism succeeds in con- 
vincing the people that tariffs make wages high it is teaching some 
workingmen that it is right for them to filch money from the 
pockets of other workingmen. The moral effect of the wages lie 
is none the less bad because it is a lie. The man who thinks he 
is stealing, or who imagines that he is living upon money unjustly 
taken from another, is morally on a level with the man who does 



30 PAUPERIZING AND BRUTALIZING LABOR. 

steal or the man who does live upon plunder that may have been 
bestowed upon him. 

The tariff abomination teaches the most ignorant, the most 
immoral, and the most completely foreignized section of the 
American people — the ones most sorely in need of instruction in 
the fundamentals of American civilization — that industry and thrift 
are not of prime importance, but that government assistance is 
absolutely necessary to their prosperity. Having unsettled labor 
with these shameful precepts and lying promises, protectionism 
withholds the expected plunder and shows in its own ostentatious 
wealth and lavish display what privilege does for men. Goaded 
to exasperation, the workingman sometimes strikes and riots, and 
perhaps in defeat he is starved and driven from home a vagabond, 
but he goes forth — a dupe no more — sullenly to join the great 
army which, oflQcered and led by exiles from moaarchial Europe, 
nurses here the hatred of wealth and authority that was engen- 
dered there. 

This is a matter which the native-born Americans who have 
sought refuge on the farms from this foreign invasion will have to 
consider some time. Why not now ? It is a question which may 
yet be settled, and settled right. Delays are dangerous. Time 
presses. The annihilation of the tariff iniquity is the first duty of 
freemen. It is feeding fat on the substance and the estates of 
men who never knew a master. A republic in which all men are 
equal cannot with safety to itself habituate millions in this way to 
semi-dependence. A republic cannot accustom a great class to the 
idea that it is right to prey upon another class. A republic 
cannot with impunity permit one class of men to delude and 
exasperate another class of men. A republic is for all, or it is a 
mockery. A republic which develops in the minds of a consider- 
able number of its citizens the idea that government is a thing to 
be plundered, or a plunderer itself ever ready to bestow upon them 
with one hand property taken from other men with the other hand, 
is producing at both extremities of the social scale the very elements 
which have destroyed more than one civilization and which on 
more than one occasion have menaced our own. 



PAUPERIZING AND BRUTALIZING LABOR. 31 

"When the embattled farmers stood at Concord and fired the 
shot that was heard round the world it was held to be a crime to 
tax one man for the benefit of another man. It is a crime to-day. 
All of the collateral tariff infamies hang upon this one offense. 
Put an end to that and kindred evils and dangers will fall away of 
their own weight, depriving no honest ipan of anything that 
belongs to him and bringing disaster only to scoundrels who de- 
serve neither compassion nor defense. 



PROTECTIONISM'S HOLLOW INSINCERITY. 



The American tariff crime is maintained by its beneficiaries with 
an insincerity so impudent that the wrong done to the people 
becomes doubly scandalous by reason of it. There is absolutely 
nothing behind the tariff bulwarks that sometimes appear so for- 
midable but the consciousness of guilt. 

Every campaign that the tariff robbers enter upon they expect 
to be the last. They have many dupes, but that they do not deceive 
themselves is proved by the facility with which they dart from one 
clumsy falsehood to another and by the fact that they depend for 
success more upon vulgar scares and tricks than upon logical and 
straightforward argument. Like commoner thieves, they have no 
principle but theft. Like the cheap pickpockets and confidence 
men known to the police magistrates, they are always on the defens- 
ive and base their hopes of escape on the inspiration that the hour 
or the occasion may give to nimble wits. 

This explains why protectionism has no literature. Ci ime never 
did have a literature. Its votaries rise, flourish and fall, leaving 
no records save those that appear in pages that recount the tri- 
umphs of their foes. The motive of theft and injustice is the same 
wherever they may be found, and with that motive all learning, 
all art, all morality, all justice, is forever and everywhere at war. 
Like other criminal propagandas, protectionism is unknown in the 
libraries. It is a stranger to the schools. It is repulsive to youth. 
It is abhorrent to intelligence and virtue. Frowned upon by all 
these and indorsed only by greed, the efforts in recent years of a 
few misguided advocates of tariff theft to force their way into 
libraries with meretricious campaign documents and into classrooms 
with paid instructors in the art of robbery and oppression can have 
no lasting result, for the invincible powers of truth are against 
<hem and ultimately will prevail. 

82 



PROTECTIONISM'S HOLLOW INSINCERITY. 33 

Most of the intelligent defenders of a great wrong are neces- 
sarily insincere. Lack of candor is a noticeable trait in all crimi- 
nals. It is noteworthy that it is to be found also in men who for 
one reason or another defend crime and criminals. Was that 
republican president of the United States who, in his defense of 
the McKinley bill, said that a cheap coat made a cheap man a sin- 
cere president ? Was that republican congressman who said, in 
defense of the same iniquity, that cheapness was akin to nastiness 
a sincere congressman ? Was that republican senator who, in 
defense of McKinleyism, asked : ''Who cares for half a cent on the 
price of a tin cup?" an honest senator ? 

If the answer be " Yes," let us put these men on the stand to- 
day and ask them a few questions about the McKinley law, and we 
will find they now claim that they drafted, passed and signed that 
bill for the express purpose of making things cheap. Do candid 
men, do honest men change ground in that way in two years ? In 
1890, when the purpose of this legislation was known and when its 
effects were visible on every hand, nobody pretended to say that it 
had any object aside from the enrichment of the knaves who paid 
for it in advance by contributing to the republican campaign fund 
the most colossal bribe ever known in American history. In 1892, 
when the thefts committed under it are less conspicuous, but none 
the less real, every republican who had a part in the crime stands 
forth to say that the measure was designed to lower prices 1 There 
is a lie here that cannot be hidden. It is a lie that was suggested 
as an afterthought, a lie hurriedly concocted in the face of a grave 
political emergency and a lie which no man ever utters without 
revealing in his face the consciousness of his own scoundrelism. 

The American people saw this tariff made. They saw how it 
was made, by whom it was made and for what it was made. They 
know that men have gone to the scaffold for much less serious 
offenses against the people than the authors of this stupendous 
crime committed when they betrayed their country into the hands 
of monopoly for a price. They know that the much used and 
much abused word "treason" regains its old and true meaning 
when applied to a sin such as this. They know that the tariff party 
was insincere when for years in its platforms it promised tax 



34 PROTECTIONISM'S HOLLOW INSINCERITY. 

reduction, and they know that it is insincere now when, having 
bartered wicked laws for corruption funds, it seeks to persuade its 
victims that it had their welfare in view all of the time. 

This vein of dissimulation and hypocrisy runs through every 
protectionist argument or assertion. In the beginning no man 
denied that tariffs increased the price not only of imported goods 
on which they were laid but of domestic products that came in 
competition with them. Now it is held with a smirk that they 
cheapen all prices. When complaint was made because of these 
prices it was said with a dropping of one eyelid that prices were 
high because wages were high. When it was shown that wages in 
protected industries were no higher and in many cases were lower 
than in unprotected industries, it was denied with a sneer that the 
tariff was a tax at all. When the farmer complained that the 
manufacturer was taking advantage of him, a pretense of putting 
a protective tariff on farm products was made and the doctrine was 
then daringly proclaimed that tariffs cheapen the' prices of manu- 
factured goods but increase the prices of everything that the agri- 
culturist has to sell. 

These are not clever falsehoods. They are outrageously clumsy. 
They are first uttered with a suspicion that they will be drowned in 
a chorus of jeers and are repeated only when it becomes evident 
that the capacity of men to accept them has been underestimated. 
The hopes of their authors hang all of the time on the success of 
this or that desperate expedient. No tariff robber expects that his 
system will live. It has lasted much longer than he ever imagined 
it could last. But, like the thief in the night, he takes his life in 
his hand and goes forth expecting the worst, but hoping by wit or 
by trick to gain one more day or month or year of plunder. 

The time has come to exterminate this sneaking marauder. He 
no longer makes a pretense either of honesty or of candor. He 
knows he is wrong. He knows that at the best his days are num- 
bered. He once had respect for his victims. Now he holds them 
in contempt. Is there manliness enough in America to dispatch 
him? 



COINING MONEY OUT OF BLOOD. 



Sentiment and association have done much to fasten the pro- 
tective tariff on the American people. The man whose son fell at 
Chancellorsville has had the tenderest emotions of his heart played 
upon by thieves and the agents of thieves that they might roll in 
luxury. They were willing to give him the memories of that 
bloody day if he would give them license to plunder him and his 
neighbor. 

The man whose father died with face to the foe at Antietam 
that afternoon in September thirty years ago has been voting f^T 
tariff and privilege all these years because he could not turn his 
back upon a piece of paper labeled "Republican." The man 
whose brother perished on the front line at Chickamauga, the man 
who as a youth experienced the mighty exultation of victory at 
Gettysburg and the crippled veteran who left a leg or an arm at 
Donelson have been surely counted upon by the crafty proponents 
of this system, because it was known that sentiment and associa- 
tion were strong and that even knaves could touch chords in the 
human heart whose vibrations could be exactly predicted in ad- 
vance. 

The sacrifices of the war were many and terrible, but not even 
the anguish of the time itself was more touching than have been 
the deprivations suffered by millions since that period in the name 
of patriotism. The tariff harpies began their gluttony while the 
struggle was yet in progress, and, first feasting fat on the blood of 
their countrymen, they have since then mounted to power and 
wealth by playing on the noblest impulses of a nation. " Vote as 
you shot" has been their cry, and the man who braved the enemy 
in defense of liberty and justice has obediently voted for industrial 
slavery and injustice. 

The first republican party tariff bill of 1860, which became a 
law in 1861, was framed as a bribe to Pennsylvania, then as now 

35 



36 COININO MONET OUT OF BLOOD. 

the seat of the protectionist infamy. The second republican party 
tariff bill was passed in the summer of 1862. That was the sum- 
mer of Fair Oaks, Mechanicsville, the Chickahominy marshes, 
Chantilly, Malvern Hill and the second Manassas; the summer also 
of Lexington, Donelson, Henry and Shiloh. A million of men 
were in arms under a tropical sun contending against the then mil- 
itant idea that it was right for one man to deprive many men of 
the fruits of their toil. A hundred thousand new-made graves, 
stretching in yellow lines from the lower Mississippi to the majes- 
tic Potomac, at the very base of the American capitol, attested the 
devotion of a great people. The sword ruled the land. Every 
hamlet was a camp and the drum-beat became a monotony as the 
tramping tens and hundreds and thousands hurried away. Surely 
if the mighty spirit thus enlisted on the side of right could be 
caught and tamed to the will of a master in chicane and fraud it 
were well worth while! 

This was the occasion seized upon for the enactment of the 
republican party's second tariff bill. When the armies of the 
union were giving to the world the most sublime manifestation of 
the popular subordination of wealth, happiness, even life itself, to 
the maintenance of an idea, there moved through the corridors of 
the capitol and darted here and there about its committee-rooms 
with stealthy tread the very men who appeared there two years 
ago in a time of profound peace when another republican party 
tariff bill was under way. They asked and they received. No 
avarice was too great to meet instant indorsement. Whatever tax 
this man or that man had the hardihood to demand, that tax was 
laid by a congress that was quick to do the bidding of monopoly. 
Here was a contrast such as the world always sees when circum- 
stances call forth the sublimest virtues of a people. When heroes 
battle for the right the knave and coward prowl in the rear. On 
one side of the Potomac a million of lion-hearted, chivalric men 
ready, if need be, to offer their lives as the last full measure of 
their devotion to liberty. On the other side, a handful of wretches 
whose god was Greed and whose end was monopoly! 

The third republican tariff bill was passed in the summer of 
1864 without debate in either house of congress and almost without 



CO INI NO MONET OUT OF BLOOD. 37 

amendment. It embodied every selfish device that the miad of 
avarice could suggest. It was the most stupendous measure of 
taxation ever known on this planet. Justified at the time only by 
the stress of war, it nevertheless in many of its features made 
revenue a secondary object and was in some notorious respects 
wholly for plunder. It had been concocted in committee exactly 
as the bill of 1862 had been concocted and as the McKinley bill of 
1890 was concocted. The people were not heard. No man 
appeared in their interest. The knave who wanted to tax his fel- 
low men had but to signify the desire. Thus constructed, the bill 
was presented to congress by a republican protectionist who, 
ashamed even of his kind, apologized for it, pronouncing it the 
most cruel burden ever inflicted upon a nation and pledged his 
word that the increased taxes should be remitted as soon as the 
war should come to an end. That was twenty-eight years ago, and 
substantially this same tariff was in force in 1890 when McKinley 
added 5, 10, 20 and 50 per cent, to schedules that had been consid- 
ered crushing in time of war. 

It was a solemn hour for America in more senses than one when 
the tariff of 1864 became a law. The serious business of the war 
was then in hand. A grim warrior at the head of two hundred 
thousand bronzed veterans was hewing his way through the Wil- 
derness. Another grim warrior was clamoring at the gates of 
Georgia. The whole country was in arms and no man could see 
the end. Armies marched away with buoyant step to return no 
more. Even patriots grew sick of bloodshed and turned from the 
contemplation of what yet remained to be done. The death angel 
hovered over every city street and country lane and the beat 
of his wings was heard in every home. At this impressive 
moment, when money and estates seemed but baubles for a gener- 
ous people to throw into the dread scale that already contained so 
much that was dearer, when the dripping sword was never 
sheathed, when the beaten earth could no more drink the blood 
that was shed and when for the first time in the long struggle the 
lamentations of overwrought human nature seemed likely to drown 
out the inspiriting call to arms, the republican party pledged itself 
to the repeal of these taxes on the instant that the war should cease. 



38 COINING MONEY OUT OF BLOOD. 

That pledge has uot been kept. It has not only been ignored ; 
it has been deliberately violated. The burdens of war, the 
injustices inflicted upon the people when their backs were turned, 
the atrocious evidences of greed unexampled in the annals of 
nations, all remain, and more than that. They have been added 
to by a political party bribed by monopoly which even yet has 
leaders who do not hesitate to summon the ghosts of departed 
heroes and the sentiments and associations of war time, to serve 
the very masters who coined money out of the republic's agony. 
Monopoly now demands and pays for in corruption funds all and 
more than the life and death struggle of 1861-5 was thought to 
justify. The man who would vote as he shot, if an intelligent man 
and if not corrupted by the concomitants of privilege, should have 
no difficulty in perceiving that he shot at this very thing. Before 
it was fairly destroyed in one place it had sprung up in another. 
He must vote it down now, as he shot it down then. 



THE MISUSE OF STATISTICS. 



Statistics are very impressively employed by the attorneys of 
the privileged classes in America. There is a certain popular rev- 
erence for figures which makes their use by skillful knaves highly 
advantageous to whatever mischievous project they may have in 
view. Many a confidence man has found that his expertness at 
figures was of more service to him than his fluency of tongue or 
his persuasiveness of manner. Columns of numerals handsomely 
arranged naturally inspire awe, and when cleverly martialed to 
emphasize a point in controversy may generally be depended upon 
to silence opposition or to precipitate a dispute in which the main 
issue will be lost sight of. The man, therefore, who has a weak 
cause finds in shrewdly manipulated statistics his safest defense, 
for, besides silencing the uninformed, he can exasperate the 
learned and lead his adversary away from the points in his own 
position that he knows to be indefensible. 

It is obvious enough that any discussion based upon statistics 
must be wholly inconclusive unless there shall be some commonly 
accepted standard on which such information shall be based, and 
even then, such are the infirmities of human nature, both parties 
to the argument cannot always guarantee to each other or to them- 
selves a fair and honest application of the statistics that are used. 
Figures are employed with unerring accuracy in many lines of 
thought because in the nature of things there are problems that 
admit of exact demonstration by such means, but it is worse than 
folly for a reasonable man to permit his respect for mathematics 
to lead him into an intellectual quagmire from which there can be 
no escape save as his false guide may urge him on and on from one 
sink hole to another. 

Of late years the tariff beneficiaries in this country, like some 
more vulgar swindlers, have made a merit of their facility as 
figurers. So long as they could excite interest and command 

39 



40 THE MISUSE OF STATISTICS. 

respect Ibey were confident of two things — first, tliat the particular 
thievery in which they were concerned would not be disturbed, 
and, second, that whether their statistics were false or not, the 
average partisan of theirs never would know the difference. It 
has been as necessary for these tariff sharpers to maintain a plaus- 
ible defense in figures as it is for the lottery shark, the green goods 
man or the mining stock rogue to do the same. Without figures 
their colossal fraud would have fallen to pieces long ago, for there 
has been nothing in reason or in morals that could possibly com- 
mend it to the people. Playing upon the popular respect for 
statistics, these scoundrels have sought to prove by such methods 
that things naturally absurd and unbelievable could be relegated 
to the realms of exact science, and that follies so grotesque and 
swindles so palpable as to tax even the credulity of fools were 
truths which all men were or should be glad to accept. It is un- 
necessary to state here that the so-called statistics used for this 
purpose have been boldly invented and viciously distorted to suit 
occasions ; that the utterances of the greatest and the best of pro- 
tectionism's advocates bristle with forgeries and perversions, and 
that most of the genuine figures used have about as much relev- 
ancy to the tariff as they have to the day's meteorological chart. 

The man who employs statistics to establish an idea should be 
compelled to explain very clearly the object that he has in view. In 
1876 the tariff beneficiaries undertook to prove by figures that they 
were not getting very much the better of other people by reason 
of their unjust laws. In 1880 they sought to show that it was their 
employes alone who received the benefit. In 1884 they contended, 
always with figures, that all Americans — sixty millions of them — 
were benefited because a few of them had the privilege of taxing 
the others. In 1888 they held, with figures to support them, that 
but for their peculiar tariff device there could be no prosperity in 
this country. In 1890 they cited miles of statistical tables to show 
that, even if monopoly tariffs did raise the prices of the necessaries 
of life, the people were nevertheless enriched by them, and now, 
since that proposition has not been favorably received, they have 
figures quite as forcible to establish the new theory that tariffs are 
designed to make prices low. 



THE MISUSE OF STATISTICS. 41 

In such a service as this statistics become mere burglars' tools 
in the hands of housebreakers. They have been drawn upon to 
defend every contradiction which these self-confessed villains 
have been guilty of. No matter what grotesque nonsense or what 
unblushing impertinence the defenders of commercial and indus- 
trial bondage have had the temerity to advance, they have always 
fortified it with figures that seemed to fit the case. That all this 
has been mere trickery is now plainly seen, for the grand chorus 
of liars, beset on all sides, no longer falsify in concert, and the 
discordant shoutings that arise from every quarter can have no 
other effect than to fix the attention of the people upon a crew 
whose only aim has been deception and plunder. 

Let the object of this tariff be kept plainly in view and statis- 
tics that appear to support the contention of its beneficiaries that 
it is for the public welfare will have about as much effect on the 
issue as the final protest of the gallows-bird has upon the man who 
is to pull the trap. That object cannot now be concealed, though sta- 
tistical tables were piled mountain high. There are some domains 
which figures cannot enter. Morals cannot be undermined by fig- 
ures. Honesty, liberty, justice, truth and equal rights have noth- 
ing to fear from figures. A well ascertained purpose to do wrong 
may by the crafty manipulation of figures be hidden for a time, 
but sooner or later it must stand revealed. No man who has been 
made the victim of a thief pauses to argue the amount of his loss 
with him or to discuss the statistics of crime. The swindler may 
delude his victim for a season, but the avowed robber finds noth- 
ing but the jail, the jury and the judgment awaiting him. 

The tariff robbers in America have made the serious mistake of 
avowing their robberj^ first and afterward trying to perpetuate it 
by means of a confidence game. They are contradictory even in 
their theft. Most robbers begin craftily and end in violence. The 
tariff robbers tried violence first and craft afterward. Their ob- 
ject being known, why should their bogus figures be heeded ? 
Their purpose having been avowed, why should even their most 
plausible arrays of statistics, all calculated to persuade men that 
right is wrong and wrong is right, be permitted to delay for an in- 
stant the chastisement that they have so richly merited ? They 



42 THE MISUSE OF STATISTICS. 

have set out to convince their victims of an impossibility. Enjoying 
corrupt privileges, which they alone demanded and bought, their 
aim now is by figures to persuade the people whom they oppress 
that a swindle plainly enough designed to benefit a few does in 
fact benefit all. 

To be effective and trustworthy, statistics must be brought 
forward in support of propositions that do not do violence to the 
intelligence of men. When employed otherwise they savor only 
of legerdemain or folly or crime. A clever inmate of an alms- 
house may be able to demonstrate by figures that society would be 
much better off if all men dwelt in almshouses, but he can gain 
no hearers. A convict may show in many columns of figures that 
it does not pay to punish crime, but he is unheard. There have 
been lunatics who have demonstrated to a certainty so far as mere 
figures could go that the world should have come to an end years 
ago, but they excited only ridicule and disbelief. In fact, the 
craziest propositions that men have ever known have been fortified 
most powerfully by figures. 

Justice is a simple matter. There is something in every man's 
breast that enables him to see it and to know it, if he will but deal 
fairly with himself. The knowledge of good and evil is intuitive. 
Self-interest and self-deception may smother it in places, but the 
mass of mankind cannot and will not repress it. They know that 
this idea of protection is not only a fraud but a lie. They know 
that it must be destroyed — not a little of it, not a part of it, but all 
of it — if justice is to be done. Bogus statistics have served the 
purpose of the men who have used them. They have confused 
some of the people and delayed judgment. That is all. They 
cannot stay the avenging hand much longer. 



ENORMOUS WASTE OF PROTECTIONISM. 



The enormous waste of the protective tariff system is not the 
least of the objections that may be urged against it. It took four 
years of war and a political and social revolution to convince the 
slave-owners ot the wastefulness of the sj^stem to which they 
clung with so much tenacity. The two wrongs bear as striking 
a resemblance to each other in this respect as they do in many 
others. 

Slavery was wasteful because it established a patriarchal society 
not in keeping with modern ideas, because it debilitated labor, be- 
cause it necessitated vast expenditures of time and money for 
purely selfish political purposes, because its effect upon free labor 
was injurious, because it deprived more than one-half of the people 
of an incentive to thrift, because it was less productive than the 
expense of maintaining it demanded, and because it retarded the 
general development of the country in which it prevailed. 

Protection is wasteful for nearly the same reasons. It teaches 
labor of the most degraded type to look for its reward to legisla- 
tion rather than to industry and frugality. It causes thousands of 
manufacturers to devote time and money to political manipulation 
which might much more profitably be devoted to business. It 
leads to the establishment of unproductive industries in places 
where the conditions are unfavorable to their success. It is a pro- 
digious burden on the consumer, and as it is more and more in 
need of defense it calls for constantly increasing contributions from 
its dupes as well as from its beneficiaries to be used in controlling 
elections and bribing congresses. 

The few slave-owners who managed to control the business, 
politics, society and religion of the south were enabled to do so by 
the blind submission of a great host of smaller slave-owners who 
were almost as much afflicted by the system as the slaves them- 
selves. They thought they were benefited but, as a matter of 

43 



44 ENORMOUS WASTE OF PROTECTIONISM. 

fact, they were injured, as they now see plainly enough. So the 
great mass of American manufacturers, many of them the most in- 
tolerant supporters of protectionism, are sufferers from the institu- 
tion which they maintain with so much vehemence. The planter 
who boasted the possession of two, three or five slaves was likely 
to be most bitter in persecution of his opponents, just as to-day 
we find that the small manufacturer in many places exercises the 
most deplorable terrorism over the few poorly paid men that he 
may employ. As the chief profits of slavery lay in the power that 
it gave to a few men, so the only real advantage that protection 
gives to anybody is monopolized by the few who, by persuading 
many others that they also are interested, are enabled to control 
not only many lines of business but the government of a great 
nation. 

All this is wasteful. The interest of the small manufacturer lies 
in the direction of cheap materials, free marliets and the general 
prosperity of the people. The incessant exactions of political 
blackmailers are themselves a serious tax upon the manufacturer 
who is not in the favored circle of tariff kings. He derives 
some advantages from the system, but they are more than offset 
by the disadvantages which it inflicts upon him. He finds that 
under an institution that has been seized upon by a few monopo- 
lists to advance their own fortunes business independence is un- 
known to the mass of the people and that he must either bend the 
knee to these offensive upstarts or face the prospect of immediate 
ruin. Nothing but political prejudice or unconquerable ignorance 
can reconcile so many intelligent men to a tyranny so offensive and 
so costly as this. 

The effect of protection is to discourage enterprise of every ' 
legitimate sort. The effect of slavery was the same. The man 
who knows he is robbing the consumer to whom he caters, who 
must buy of him or go without, has no greater incentive to industry 
and progress than the man who knew he was stealing the labor 
that he used. Protectionism puts a premium upon sloth and 
ignorance. So did slavery. Protectionism says to the manufac- 
turer: "Here is a cornered market whose victims must buy of you. 
Tour customers and your profits are assured. You have no 



ENORMOUS WASTE OF PROTECTIONISM. 45 

occasion to try new processes, to invest in new machines, or to pay 
any attention to the progress of the age. If foreigners take advan- 
tage of important discoveries in science and mechanics and at length 
are able to compete with you in spite of the tariff, we will add 20 
per cent or 40 per cent to your protection." Slavery said the same 
thing to the planter, in a different way. It told him to raise but 
one crop, to resist to his utmost the mighty pressure of civilization 
and humanity and to give no heed to the men who suggested new 
ideas in production or in mechanics. But, as in the case of pro- 
tection now, improvements came in spite of slavery. The cotton 
gin, invented by a New Euglander, quadrupled the wealth of the 
south in a year. Slavery could not have produced it, yet slavery 
stole it, and, besides refusing to pay its inventor for his discovery, 
it used the wonderful instrument to fortify with wealth and respec- 
tability its own thieving institution. 

Slavery could have exchanged every negro in the south for 
Whitney's gin and made money by the operation. It stole the gin 
as it had stolen the blacks. There have been inventions since 
that day that would have justified protected manufacturers in re- 
mitting every penny of their wicked impositions upon the people, 
but they have coolly appropriated the discoveries and sought new 
fields for plunder. 

Protectionism invents nothing, as slavery invented nothing. 
The minds of many sagacious men are continually employed in de- 
vising ways and means of overcoming the unjust advantages 
which protection confers upon its beneficiaries, and when success 
crowns their efforts and by new methods production is cheapened 
protectionism seizes upon the invention and claims that the cheap- 
ness thus obtained was what it was striving for all of the time. 

Slavery was wasteful also because it was carried as a political 
issue at great expense into regions where it could not possibly exist 
as an industrial system. So protectionism wastes the substance of 
the people because by appealing to the cupidity and the prejudice 
of men it leads to the establishment of so-c.dled industries in places 
where they cannot naturally be conducted at a profit, and then points 
to their languishing condition as a sufficient reason why the people 
should be taxed at an ever increasing rate for their maintenance. 



46 ENORMOUS WASTE OF PROTECTIONISM. 

It is a fact that must be apparent to any intelligent mind 
that if the manufacturers of this country had expended the time 
and money that they have devoted to the beguilement and the cor- 
ruption of the people in eflforts to improve their processes and to 
widen their markets they would be better off to-day with free trade 
than they are with the tariff of abominations which they them- 
selves made and enacted into law. 

So long as the south leaned upon slavery the few great benefi- 
ciaries of that institution persuaded all of the people, whether 
slave-owners or not, to the belief that without slavery they could not 
exist. Slavery was the tyrant of politics, the patron of industry, 
the ruler of society, the arbiter of commerce and the god of the 
church. To-day it is a memory only, and there are in the southern 
states more enlightened politics, more productive industry, a more 
wholesome society, a wider commerce and a more perfect religion. 
Protectionism has thrown this same thraldom over the north and 
west. It corrupts and enfeebles politics, society, industry, com- 
merce and religion. It wastes, it consumes and it destroys. Only 
a few profit by it. It should be exterminated as completely as 
slavery was exterminated, and for the same reasons. 



WHAT PROTECTIONISM TRIED TO DO. 



The American people are more deeply interested in what the 
tariff plunderers have attempted to do than they are in what they 
really have done. They are profoundly interested in the object of 
ail these tariff bills. When he submitted his odious measure to 
congress William McKinley, Jr., made many candid avowals of his 
willingness to serve monopolistic rapacity, but none more open 
than this : "We have not been so much concerned about the prices 
of the articles we consume as we have been to encourage a system 
of home production." 

The object of the protective tariff is plainly outlined in this 
unblushing confession. That object was clearly foreshadowed 
when the ways and means committee permitted manufacturers 
and the agents of manufacturers to take the McKinley bill out of 
its hands and arrange it to suit themselves. It was not denied when, 
after its enactment as a law, prices advanced and president, 
senators and congressmen began to denounce cheap things as nasty 
things. They meant all this when they passed the bill. Defeat 
alone caused a change to come over the avowed purpose of the 
robbers. They had been bold and defiant, declaring without equiv- 
ocation that they did not care what prices the consumer had to 
pay and only thinly cloaking their purpose to confer privilege upon 
favored interests by indulging in the euphemism of "encouraging 
home production." Defeat made them liars as well as cowards 
and hypocrites. They had been outspoken in their championship 
of monopoly. Defeat made them cautious and deceitful. They 
had ignored or reviled the consumer. Defeat brought them to the 
ground in abasement before that forgotten and much despised in- 
dividual. They had dismissed cheapness, honesty, justice and 
economy, with a contempt which they sought to make fashionable. 
Defeat made every rogue among them a minister of righteousness, 

47 



48 WHAT PROTECTIONISM TRIED TO DO. 

a preacher of cheapness and an evangelist showing forth the 
necessity of practicing economy in public as well as in private life. 
The men who had condemned cheapness one year officiated as 
high priests at its altar the next. Cheapness is now their excuse. 
We know it was not their object. 

In the original scheme of protectionism, as in that of slavery, 
no account was taken of its victims. As slavery ignored the human 
chattel, so protectionism ignored the consumer. The slavery ques- 
tion was discussed for many years without taking the slave into 
consideration at all. What he thought about it was not to the 
point. When, finally, as a last resort of desperate men, it was 
maintained by the slave-owner that slavery was a good thing for 
the victim, the proposition was made not to the slave himself, but 
to free men hundreds of miles away. No one ever presumed to 
ask the slave's opinion of that idea. He w^as unheard. It was a 
crime to teach him to read. His word was not good in a court of 
law. He was not a part}^ to the contest, although, in one view of 
the case, it concerned him alone. So protectionism ignored the 
consumer for many centuries. 

From the earliest days of barbarism until a very recent period 
no thief who could devise a scheme of protection for himself ever 
gave a thought 1o the consumer. In such miserable tracts, pam- 
phlets or apologies as have been published in the interest of pro- 
tectionism, the consumer is never mentioned and the aim of the 
proposed beneficiary has been to convince the world that there is 
no such person. Of late the consumer has come into court, 
where it has been found that he reads and writes, that he is a com- 
petent witness, and that he also votes. In his indignant presence the 
thieves who have devoured his substance have awakened to the 
fact that the consumer must be taken into account, and with un- 
paralleled impudence they have done a thing that slavery never 
did : They have gone before their victims — the men whom they 
have beggared — and, with the older slavery's wicked lie on their 
lips, they have told these plundered millions that a system, whose 
object, known for a half-dozen centuries to be theft, is really 
maintained for their benefit ; that, instead of being for a few, it is 
for all 1 



WRAT PROTECTIONISM TRIED TO DO. 49 

What would the blacks on a southern plantation have said if the 
defenders of human bondage had confronted them with the false- 
hood that they had been bought and sold into slavery to improve 
their physical and moral condition ? The most benighted slave 
that ever lived knew that he had been stolen, and that his labor 
was stolen. In the days of his greatest security and audacity, no 
attorney of the slave system would have submitted this amazing 
proposition to the victims of the wrong that he was defending. 
That lie was nut invented for the slave, but for the purpose of 
impressing ignoramuses elsewhere, who could not know by expe- 
rience what the horrors of slaver}*^ really were. 

It remained for the scoundrels hired to defend a later wrong to 
go before the people whom protectionism has openly and admit- 
tedly oppressed for more than a generation, and to tell them to 
their faces that they are the real beneficiaries of a system that en- 
slaves trade and industry, corners markets, and now seeks by 
crafty lies to debauch a people who inherited liberty, virtue and 
intelligence. In this respect protectionism has outslaved slavery. 
Few blacks ever reached that degree of degradation which would 
have made even the discussion of their condition in their presence 
a safe procedure, but we see by the attitude of our present slave 
drivers that in their opinion the time has come when the American 
people can be asked by a grand plebiscite to perpetuate upon their 
own necks the yokes which were originally imposed on the plea of 
necessity, and afterward were continued through treachery and 
deceit. 

The object of protectionism was and is the taxation of all of the 
people for the benefit of a class. It calculated on increased prices 
for the necessaries of life, and, with a greed as deliberate as it 
was vicious, it arranged matters so that its beneficiaries could 
pocket the increase. Naturally enough, some of its plans miscar- 
ried. Invention and the sagacity of men, ever at war with monop- 
oly and injustice, have circumvented the thieves in some respects, 
and not all of the coveted plunder has been secured. Here and 
there an article aimed at by the McKinley bill has escaped the 
scaling up of prices, and no drowning man ever yet clutched at a 
straw with the desperation shown by these wretches as they make 



50 WHAT PROTECTIONISM TRIED TO DO. 

haste to claim as the result of design what is obviously the result 
of accident. 

Protectionism is at the bar of public opinion on trial for its life. 
It is to be judged and punished for what it tried to do, as well as 
for what it has done. It started out defiantly to subject the great 
mass of the American people to the oppression of a few. When 
first challenged, it admitted its purpose and justified it. It now 
crawls and cringes before the men whom it sought to enslave, and 
asks them in God's name to sustain it, for it was designed for their 
benefit. Slavery had many sins to answer for, but it spared the 
world an exhibition of such scoundrelism as this. Slavery did not 
go down on its knees, and with tears in its eyes entreat the victims 
of the lash and the bloodhound to join its legions and fight for an- 
other cycle of servitude. The point at which slavery stopped 
without resource has been clearly overreached by the easy infamy 
of protectionism. 

How serious this crime has become is shown by the fact that mil- 
lions of men, a portion of them supposedly intelligent and honest, 
go to the polls enthusiastically each year to support an institution 
known to be immoral, and by the further fact that even the polit- 
ical party which, in its platforms, denounces it as a fraud and as 
robbery, contains many voters who imagine that a little industrial 
slavery may be a good thing. The evil has taken too deep a root 
to be easily eradicated. No one political victory will prevail 
against it. It has baffled all opposition in one party. It has 
tainted to some extent the other party. It can be destroyed only 
by victory after victory, by blow after blow, as the great army of 
slavery was destroyed. All its banners must come down in the 
dust. All its supporters must be disarmed. All its dupes must be 
set free. All its crimiaal organizations for the stuffing of ballot- 
boxes, for the bribery of voters and for the intimidation of labor 
must be broken up. Its object is known. Its destruction is 
certain. 



WHO RECEIVES THE PLUNDER? 



Somebody profits by the monopoly tariff. Who is he ? Is he 
the man who goes to Washington and persuades Congress to give 
him all that he asks in the way of protective taxation, or is he the 
man who toils for his daily bread and who never saw the great 
dome at the capital ? 

The man who goes to Washington when tariff bills are in 
progress is now seeking to convince the man who has not been 
twenty-five miles away from home since he returned with the army 
from Appomattox that he — the man who never asked for a cent's 
worth of protection— is the real beneficiary of the tariff system. 
Does it stand to reason ? Is there a man in America who can say 
that he believes it ? 

Here are two citizens of a republic under which it is asserted 
that all are equal. One spent three months at the capital in the 
summer of 1890 on his own business. He haunted the rooms of 
the ways and means committee which had the tariff bill in charge. 
He gave banquets and receptions to congressmen. He made 
speeches to committees. He pleaded for a high tariff on the article 
in the production of which he was interested. He openly con- 
fessed that his sole object was the destruction of foreign competi- 
tion. He wanted the home market to himself. He made no 
pretense that his errand was other than a selfish one. The other 
man remained at home. He never asked the government for any 
unjust law. He was not interested in tariffs. He never petitioned 
for an increase of protection. He never asked for a higher tariff 
on anything. He had heard that taxes were to be reduced. He 
certainly had no part in any movement looking to their extension. 
While the other man schemed in Washington he worked at home, 
and while he still works he is told that the legislation of 1890 was 
in his interest and not in that of the few who made it their business 
to secure it. Is that credible ? Is it within the range of reason? 

51 



52 WHO RECEIVES THE PLUNDER? 

In these days of invention and progress the inevitable tendency 
in the prices of nearly all manufactured articles is toward cheap- 
ness. Tariff taxation for the benefit of favored classes merely 
obstructs the natural movement. In some directions it fails of its 
purpose altogether, but its object cannot be questioned. The 
most oppressive tariff that ever was devised could not forever serve 
to monopolize as to all things even a cornered market. The inge- 
nuity of men will defeat the craft of other men. The article that 
is cheaper to-day than it was a year or ten years ago, is so not be- 
cause of the tariff, but in spite of it. 

The beneficiaries of protectionism understand this fact very 
well. They do not expect that a tariff which answers their pur- 
poses to-day will be satisfactory to them forever. They know that 
time and the inventive faculty of men are against them. They 
know that the opportunity to make money fast under a new pro- 
tective tariff— particilarly under one that they constructed to suit 
themselves — comes very soon after its adoption. More money was 
grabbed by the beneficiaries of the McKinley bill in the six months 
following its passage than will ever be made again by them in as 
many years. The tin plate steal was of itself enough to satisfy 
for a season many of the most ravenous advocates of the latest 
monopoly tariff. 

If a man can make a fortune in a year by the operation of an un- 
just law he does not care particularly for the slower and more 
methodical robbery which satisfies other members of the privileged 
class. The few merchants to whom the sum of $6,000,000 was paid 
out of the United States treasury on the ribbon tax refund decision, 
won a prize in the tariff lottery that probably satisfied them. That 
money was taken from the people by the government and handed 
over to private individuals. The tin plate swindle was not less 
viciouSo The date on which the increased tax was to go into effect 
was set far enough ahead to enable British and American specula- 
tors to accumulate immense stocks in this country, which were 
disposed of at an increased price, on account of a tax that had not 
yet gone into effect. When it is remembered that the coal barons, 
by raising the price of coal 25 cents a ton, can lay a tax of 
), 000,000 on the American people and collect it, no one will be 



WHO RECEIVES THE PLUNDER? 58 

disposed to sneer at what may seem to be a small thing. It is these 
small injustices, encouraged and legalized by the United States 
government, which account for many of the great fortunes that are 
accumulated so suddenly in this country. They are made up of 
small stealings from millions of hard-working men who are shame- 
lessly betrayed by their own government into the hands of the 
spoiler. 

Every year the defenders of this system go through the land 
quoting prices on this thing or that and claiming, if it is some- 
what cheaper, that tariff taxation did it. All this is begging the 
question. Tariff taxation can cheapen nothing. Its announced 
purpose is to make products dearer. If the prices of taritF-taxed 
articles decline it is due to causes other than the tariff. The tariff 
was devised to prevent or to retard their decline, but, as invention 
cannot be chained to the chariot wheel of monopoly, new processes 
will generally defeat the purpose of the combines in the course of 
time. The boasts of these advocates of high taxes when some 
price is lowered in spite of them should deceive no intelligent per- 
son. As well might the incendiary whose torch destroyed the 
capitol at Washington in 1814 boast now that the more glorious 
building erected on the ruins of the old was due to his dastardly 
act. His purpose was not to build up but to destroy. The tariff 
plunderers who dog the footsteps of congressmen have but one aim 
and that is to take an unfair advantage of the people. If the stealing 
is good for a time — even a short time — they do not complain. 

The men who ask for monopoly tariffs and who bribe congress- 
men to get them are the ones who profit by them. The millions 
who never ask for them are the ones who suffer by them. 



BASELESSNESS OF THE WAGES LIE. 



The American workiiigman who does not resent the attitude 
which the tariff plunderers assume toward him and his associates 
is sadly deficient in some respects. A man who knows that he 
earns all that he gets, and who also knows that the hypocrites and 
Pharisees of the monopoly party do not even make a pretense of 
being interested in him, except at election time, cannot fail to view 
with contempt — one might almost say that he cannot fail to regard 
with anger — the ill-disguised scoundrelism of the men who on the 
eve of an election ask hmi to believe that their laws, their rob- 
beries, their privilege, their monopolies, are for his benefit, not 
theirs. 

Every workingman who knows enough to abandon a poor job 
and take a good one knows that the protective tariff never added a 
cent to his wages. He knows that organization has done more 
than anything else to improve the condition of labor in this 
country, as well as in others. He knows that wages always were 
higher in America than in Europe, and that high tariffs or low tariffs 
never made the slightest difference with the prevailing rate. He 
knows that the McKinley bill increased no man's wages, but that 
reductions were made in many lines after its passage. He knows 
that what he gets, and all that he gets, he must earn by honest toil, 
and that no man, protected or unprotected, pays him a cent more 
than he is compelled to pay him. 

Of what value, then, are the "statistics" of politicians to men 
whose own cash accounts, simple enough at best, show that the 
tendency of wages is downward ? Of what use is it to talk of the 
blessings of protection to men who know that when their earnings 
are threatened, as is frequently the case, they do not appeal to the 
tariff for help but to their trade organizations ? Of what use is it 
to lie about wages to men who are well aware that the one com- 
modity which they have to sell is on the free list and who know 

5i 



BASELESSJ^ESS OF THE WAGES LIE. 55 

that here in this well-protected and monopolj^-ridden land they 
must compete with pauper labor scraped together in every land and 
herded into our ports by agents of as shrewd employers as the 
world has ever seen ? 

The one point that labor has to settle with protectionism may 
be put in a nut-shell. Protection insists at all times and in all 
places, except during political campaigns, on buying its labor in 
the cheapest market. When it reduces wages or locks out its em- 
ployes it calls upon the military arm of the government for the pro- 
tection of any new men that it may hire at less pay. This is a 
legal right. If Carnegie can man his works at $1 a day he will not 
pay $3 a day. The laws of the country will and do protect him in 
this purpose. Why, then, should workingmen maintain for his 
benefit laws which permit him to sell his product in the dearest 
market known to men ? He buys his labor where it is cheapest. 
Why should not they buy their necessaries where they are 
cheapest ? He exacts the pound of flesh from labor. Why should 
labor join him in support of unjust laws that give him a cornered 
market for his product ? 

The attitude of protectionism toward labor is one of degrading 
condescension and patronage. There is not a cheap politician or 
a paltry rogue in America who will not go before an audience of 
hard-working men— men who dearly earn every dollar that they 
receive— and tell them to their faces that it is the tariff that gives 
them bread and clothing. If this is so why are American working- 
meu, with tariffs going higher all of the time, compelled to strike 
continually against reductions of wages ? If this is so why are un- 
protected workingmen better paid than workingmen who are said 
to be protected ? If this is so why are wages higher in Chicago 
than they are in New York— higher in San Francisco than they are 
in Chicago ? If this is so why is it that well-organized trades have 
good wages and trades that are not organized have low wages and 
long hours ? 

American labor is the cheapest labor on earth to-day. It is the 
most intelligent, the most industrious, the most aspiring. Ameri- 
can labor is high priced because it is productive. It has been 
sadly debauched of late by the wretched importations on contract 



66 BASELESSNESS OF THE WAGES LIE. 

in the interest of the protected industries, but it is still the best 
and, all things considered, the cheapest labor in the world. In the 
days of African slav(;ry it was supposed that the southern states 
had cheap labor, but the survivors of the war have learned their 
mistake. Slave labor was high. Free labor is cheaper, though 
nominally dearer, because it is more productive. Why, then, 
should a workingman with a particle of pride in his bosom, and who 
gives an equivalent for all that he receives, be willing to concede 
that any man or any political party is conferring alms upon him by 
paying him the ruling wage rate ? 

The intelligent workingman knows all about this wages lie him- 
self. He owes nothing to any man or to any party. His own 
strong arm gains his bread. He has no other resource. The much 
vaunted tariff, prated of by fools and villains who never did a 
stroke of work in their lives, is of no consequence to him. It 
never helped him to employment. It never raised his wages. In 
dull times it has sneaked away out of sight, disclaiming responsi- 
bility. In prosperous times it has returned pompously to demand 
the credit. It has stood by powerless when his wages were 
reduced. It has mocked him when he was helpless. It has 
oppressed him when he was well employed. It has enriched the 
men who have at length imported paupers to take his place. And 
all the time it has enhanced the price of nearly everything that he 
has had to buy. 

The wages lie is the most contemptible and vicious of all the 
tariff lies. It is a lie that is not even plausible. It is refuted a 
thousand times a day in a thousand different places. It never had 
a foot to stand on. The one and only possibility of its belief has 
rested on the fears and ignorance of its dupes. It has frightened 
many a poor man. For this reason it is a cowardly lie. It has 
misled, to his everlasting injury, many an honest but uninformed 
man. For this reason it is a scoundrelly lie. It has inflicted hard- 
ship and injustice upon millions of hard-working Americans. For 
this reason it is a cruel lie. It has brought to the pockets of mo- 
nopoly billions of dollars that belonged to the people and should 
have been used for their enlightenment and comfort. For this 
reason it is a murderous lie — a lie that has starved children and 



BASELESSNESS OF TEE WAGES LIE. 57 

killed women and driven many a man broken and despairing to the 
grave. 

Vast importations of workingmen on contract and long-con- 
tinued deception of the ignorant and wretched have done much to 
debilitate American labor. Protectionism depends for its voting 
strength in many places upon men who never heard of the Declara- 
tion of Independence, of Washington, of Jefferson or of Jackson. 
Paupers at home, many of them, they are paupers here. Deluded, 
wretched, ignorant— they are fit tools in the hands of monopoly 
for the oppression of wiser men. There need be no doubt that a 
part of the American electorate has been corrupted. A part 
believes it is right that the many should be taxed for its benefit 
and a part believes that it really receives the benefit. The true 
American workingman knows better. He knows without looking 
in a book, without reading a lying monopoly newspaper and with- 
out listening to the vaporings of a monopoly attorney on the stump 
whether his wages have been increased or not. He also knows 
whether taxation in the interest of a privileged class has reduced 
prices or not. The hope of the country hangs on the use that he 
may make of his knowledge. 



MONOPOLY-RIDDEN AGRICULTURE. 



Thirty years of protective tariff taxation have reduced American 
agriculture to a position so ignoble that in some places it does not 
even retain its self-respect. A generation ago the American 
farmer was the proudest and most independent workingman on 
earth. To-day he cannot persuade his own sou to remain on the 
farm. Thirty years of unjust laws and class privilege have made 
the farmer the sport of the cities, the butt of all the cheap wits 
and the hoped-for victim of every thief and swindler in the land. 

Thirty years of oppression by favored interests — oppression in 
many cases submitted to with cheerfulness and acquiesced in 
with patience — have established in the minds of thoughtless 
millions the idea that the farmer is necessarily a gullible fool ; that 
he is legitimate prey for shrewder men and that gold bricks and 
green goods exist for him and him alone. Thirty years of extortion 
and fraud on the part of his own government have spread the 
belief that the farmer lives to be duped and plundered, and our 
cities, large and soiall, are full of cheap fellows who have so much 
contempt for his intelligence that they are sometimes disposed to 
boast of their own forbearance in not despoiling him further. In 
the thirty years of protectionism the typical American farmer with 
whom we are familiar has been changed from a well dressed, well- 
read, independent and spirited man to a scarecrow with vacant 
eyes and gaping mouth, with the inevitable confidence man near 
at hand. We do not deceive and oppress a man and retain our 
respect for him. The contempt with which the privileged classes 
in America regard the farmer whom they plunder has been com- 
municated to the whole body of the people. 

It was the prosperity and independence of the American farmer 
that first excited the cupidity of protectionists. They wanted to 
rob him and they invented an excuse. They told him that he 
needed a home market and that they would give it to him in return 

58 



MONOPOLY-RID DE2^^ AORICULTURE. 59 

for the privilege of taxiug Liiu. When the home market swiudle 
was exposed they beguiled him with the idea that they could and 
would share their protective tariff plunder with him, and, while 
going through the mockery of putting a tariff tax on foreign agri- 
cultural products, they took occasion to increase their own share 
of the plunder. The one was a pretense. The other was real 
and tangible. The home market confidence game has been laid 
bare in Pennsylvania and New England, the seats of the great 
tariff monopolies, where fine farms, once the homes of several 
generations of Americans, are now abandoned and cannot be sold 
for even the value of the buildings. Thousands more of such 
farms are now in the hands of aliens, their former occupants 
scattered to the four corners of the earth. The farce of laying a 
protective tariff on commodities of which we produce vast surpluses 
which must be sold abroad, if at all, has been made clear since 
the tariff monopolists made their last great raid on the people, for 
the winter that followed the enactment of the McKinley law saw 
the farmers of the west burning corn for fuel, while "protected" 
laborers of the east were famishiug in their hovels and the mines 
controlled by the coal combine were closed to compel higher prices. 
The protective tariff is a tax upon consumption. It rests upon 
nearly everything that the farmer uses or wears. It is on the 
lumber in his house, on the glass in his windows, on the imple- 
ments with which he makes his crops, on his dishes, tinware, 
furniture and carpets, his cutlery and lamps, his clothing, his 
blankets and his harness. It enhances the price of nearly every- 
thing that- he buys. It does not add a farthing to the value of 
anything that he has to sell. On the contrary, its burdens rest so 
heavily upon almost all other Americans that their capacity to buy 
of his product is diminished and on frequent occasions is entirely 
destroyed. The hope held out to him that the mock tariff on agri- 
cultural products which we do not import can in any manner 
benefit him is shown to be delusive by steadily declining prices. 
It was a bribe which could not be paid. If it could have been paid it 
would have bankrupted the people. Everybody cannot be the 
gainer by class taxation. Somebody must suffer. Speaking in 
general terms, the farmer is more particularly the victim than any 



60 MONOPOLT-RIDDBN AGRICULTURE. 

other man in the United States. On his bent back the great 
monopoly burden rests. American agriculture comes in compe- 
tition with the cheapest peasant labor on earth, yet but for the 
inflictions put upon it by domestic craft and greed it would be 
amply able to take care of itself. The prices received for its 
products at home and abroad are fixed in the markets of the world. 
Its splendid surpluses are disposed of in the remotest lands and 
the returns serve to quicken every pulsation of trade and commerce 
throughout the country. Great crop years in America and deficient 
crop years abroad have made all the prosperity that we have had 
since protectionism set up its infamous lie for the deception of the 
corrupt and the ignorant. We did not recover from the waste and 
ruin of 1873-8 until the golden stream coming from Europe in pay- 
ment for the surplus products of our farmers set every wheel in 
motion. We have been able to bear increasing burdens of taxation 
since that time only because the so-called "paupers" of Europe 
have, in spite of vexatious laws, taken our grain and provisions 
and paid for them in cash or merchandise. 

Protectionism's impudent claim to credit for all American pros- 
perity and its cowardly denial of responsibility for all American 
adversity are shown to be false by the simplest possible test— a test 
which every farmer is capable of making for himself. When 
agriculture prospers the whole people prosper. When agriculture 
languishes the whole people languish. A year of bad crops brings 
disaster to manufacturers as well as to farmers, for the farmers can- 
not buy. A year of good crops, with a lively foreign demand, 
brings a competency to farmers and revives every industry. The 
money received from the taxed and despised foreign commerce of 
this country produces the prosperity which monopoly afterward 
claims as its own. Protectionism merely absorbs the wealth that 
agriculture creates. It originates nothing. It stands ready to steal 
when there is anything to steal. When depression prevails it is as 
destitute of resource as a housebreaker in a dismantled mansion. 
The magicians of the fields must produce more wealth before it 
can lift a hand even to rob. 

American agriculture is a giant in chains. It is capable of feed- 
ing the whole world. It is capable of showering blessings upon 



MONOPOLY RIDDEN AORICULTURE. 61 

this country with such lavish prodigality that every other interest 
and industry must of necessity rejoice in its strength and share in 
its abundance. Exposed as it is to the shackles of a mercenary 
class at home, hedged about as it is by laws designed to cripple 
and to oppress it abroad, and humiliated as it is by systems and 
policies cunningly devised to bring reproach and ridicule upon it 
everywhere, it nevertheless sustains by its toil and privation the 
great fabric of injustice that rests upon it. It shares none of the 
luxury of a land which it has enriched. It is poorly clothed, poorly 
fed and poorly housed. The small economies which it submissively 
practices will not in a year compensate for the wicked impositions 
which it suffers in a month at the hands of protectionism. Em- 
braced within its ranks are a majority of the people. Its patience 
under injustice, its hopefulness under adversity, its courage in the 
presence of disaster, its meekness under tyranny and its humility 
under the scorn of a class whom it has made powerful and whom 
it can, if it will, sweep away with a breath, are among the most 
amazing and pitiful exhibitions that the world has ever seen. 



POLITE PAUPERISM. 



The man who goes to the county agent and, representing him- 
self as unable to make a living, receives public assistance, is de- 
nominated and considered a pauper. The man who goes to con- 
gress and, making exactly the same representations as regards his 
business, receives public assistance, is called a protected manu- 
facturer. The one presents himself before the people's represent- 
ative timidly and shamefacedly. The other bustles into the 
presence of the people's representatives boldly and defiantly. 
Wherein do they differ ? 

We make it difficult enough for an unfortunate man to ask 
public assistance, because we throw about his helplessness the 
odor of infamy. Poverty is, of all things in this age, the most 
disgraceful. Its stigma is almost ineflaceable. Even the officials 
who are employed to dole out our bounty to the poor assume a 
harsh tone and an imperious air, as though the benefaction were 
their own, and so completely does the scorn with which society 
views penury take possession of the men who dispense the public's 
so-called charity, that no man with a spark of pride left to him 
can be induced to undergo the ordeal necessary to the enrollment 
of his name on the poor list. 

Perhaps this is as it should be, but if so, why is it that the 
proudest men among us eagerly seek to place their names upon 
that larger pauper roll that is maintained under the title of protec- 
tion and, once in receipt of the public alms thus obtained, increase 
in pride and arrogance to a degree that is even more pronounced 
than the abject degradation of their brethren who ask and 
receive as paupers ? Here is a question which the American peo- 
ple should consider with all of the seriousness of which they are 
capable. It may not be desirable to inculcate in the breasts of our 
paupers the spirit of insolence wiih which we are familiar in our 
protected class, but is it not possible that the latter should be 

63 



POLITE PAUPERISM. 63 

forced to feel in some measure the humiliation which attaches to 
the other ? Do we not make one class of paupers altogether too 
comfortable ? As a matter of fact, is the man who goes to con- 
gress for assistance in his business one whit more respectable than 
the man who goes to the county for flour and meat to assist him in 
his business ? 

There is much false pride in the world, but the pride that is the 
greatest sham is that which unblushingly demands of tbe American 
people colossal contributions in aid of private enterprises, and 
then assumes airs of exclusiveness and superiority over the plain, 
hard-working and self-respecting men and women who foot the 
bills. If we have a would-be aristocracy in this country to-day it 
is made up of the polite paupers who have publicly proclaimed 
their inability to do business and make a living without the foster- 
ing care of congress. On this shameful and lying foundation the 
claims to distinction of many of our first families rest. They are 
not only paupers. They are despicable impostors in receipt of 
alms. 

This clement lives off the people. It feeds fat on the substance 
accumulated by honorable toil. We greet its sweet-scented repre- 
sentatives with smiles when they come begging or bullying for 
more. We diguif}-^ the class into a national issue. We maintain 
a great political party exclusively to sustain their impudence and 
to lend respectability to their greed. We make their alms-getting 
a matter of daily thought and of solicitous care, while our agents 
dismiss the wretched poor with a kick in anger or a shrug of in- 
difference. At one end of the social scale we reward a fraudulent 
pauperism with honor. At the other we scorn a genuine pauper- 
ism and cover it with infamy. 

What honorable American would be guilty of this polite pau- 
perism? The self-reliance of our people was once the boast of the 
republic. They would endure privation and hunger, but they 
kept clean and they would not beg. Among the poor there was a 
sense of equality with the richest, a true pride which adversity 
and hardship could not subdue, and a hope for better things to be 
honorably won that was unconquerable. Among the rich, there 
was a consciousness of responsibility, a pride in the security of our 



64 POLITE PAUPERISM. 

institutions and the justice of our laws, and a feeling of brotherhood 
toward the less favored, which helped many a struggling way- 
farer over the thorny paths leading to fame and fortune. It was 
a helpful and generous society such as this which made real 
pauperism terrible, for it was held that a man who had to beg had 
no friends, and to have no friends was to be an outcast for cause. 
We have retained the ethics of that day as to the real pauper, but 
we have brought forth a troup of beggars on horseback, who are 
riding rough-shod over whatever there is of patience and decency 
and industry in the land. 

The time must be near at hand when these things will be seen 
in their true light. The cool impudence of the polite pauper can- 
not always prevail. Honest men who retain their relf -respect, and 
who endeavor to instruct their children in habits of industry and 
thrift cannot forever close their eyes to the scandalous example 
which this profligate crew has set before the youth of America. 
Pauperism and aristocracy are often seen side by side, but they 
cannot exist in the same persons. This pauperism is false, boast- 
ful, corrupt and vainglorious. Its character is known. Let us 
laud it no more, but rather let us pull it down, if need be, to a 
level that is lower than that on which we have by common con- 
sent placed the pauperism that is ignorant, helpless and wretched. 



ONE CAMPAIGN BADGE. 



All of the early and some of the late abolitionists found their 
greatest sorrow in the fact that many of the slaves rejoiced in their 
bondage and took pride in their servitude. The old stories of 
negroes who looked down on certain "white trash" were not jokes. 
They emphasized a painful truth. Many generations of serfdom 
had destroyed in the breasts of hundreds and thousands of blacks 
even a desire for freedom. Hope had long since died out. De- 
spair had been succeeded by brutish content, and in places this had 
been followed by more or less glorification of a condition which, 
pitiful enough at best, became all the more saddening as it was 
seen to be proudly borne. 

The hereditary slavery in which the protective tariff idea now 
holds American industry has already produced similar results. 
There are free born men and women in this country to-day who 
are so proud of their bondage to monopoly and privilege that they 
regard with very palpable disdain the people who would set them, 
free. In England and other monarchial and aristocratic countries 
there are hosts of human beings in whom the idea of subjection 
has been so thoroughly bred that they construe a suggestion calcu- 
lated to excite their ambition as an insult. The London father 
whose son was told by an American that he might some day be 
lord mayor and who responded in anger because, as he put it, the 
stranger was filling the lad's head with " a foolish desire to rise 
above his betters," was a type of the class to be found in every 
land where men have been born and habituated to inequality and 
injustice. What we laugh at in the Londoner and what the phil- 
anthropists of fifty years ago grieved over in the negro we now 
witness in "sovereign" citizens of the great republic. 

The spirit of ignorant self-abasement, of contentment as an 
inferior, of arrogance even in humiliation, is plainly enough to be 
seen nowadays when the party of monopoly and privilege indulges 

65 



66 ONE CAMPAIGN BADGE. 

in a tin plate debaucli for campaign purposes. What other impulse 
is it that leads the fool or the lout of this day to put a tin hat upon 
his empty head, to wear a tin collar around his worthless neck or 
to parade with a shouting multitude of ignoramuses with tin dip- 
pers or basins in his wildly waving hands ? What other motive is 
it that induces women, presumably the daughters or the mothers of 
free Americans, to deck themselves on occasions with tin jewelry 
and thus to proclaim and to glory in the political and industrial 
subjugation of a great people ? Well may the clever rascals who 
arrange these frivolous demonstrations smile as they look upon the 
success of their ruse, for the vacant minds and the stout lungs of 
the foolish men and the smirks on the faces of the silly women 
thus led captive betray to the whole world the shameful fact that 
people to whom was transmitted a heritage of liberty and equality 
are already glorying in their self-imposed vassalage. 

There is a tribe of barbarians in the remote regions of Alaska 
whose members kill their parents when the latter have reached the 
age of helplessness and who proclaim their unnatural murders by 
appearing in public arrayed in the choicest possessions of their 
victims. There is a savage race in the heart of Africa whose king 
demands the sacrifice to an idol on frequent occasions of the 
daughter of some one of his most powerful subjects, and though 
no daughter of a king ever yet bared her throat to the knife, the 
slaughter goes regularly on, all of the people joining in the bloody 
rites. There are whole communities of blacks in some portions of 
the south so smitten with superstition that the numerous voodoo 
doctors are the only members of the race who appear to prosper 
and yet, such is the influence of these vulgar impostors, that mis- 
sionaries and educators bearing the gospel and the primer have 
been turned back baffled and despairing by a word from a wretch 
who fattens on the misery of the creatures whom they would 
emancipate. 

The tin plate incantations of the present day appeal to the same 
degree of intelligence and are participated in by dupes equally 
destitute of true pride and wisdom. Nobody doubts the ability of 
the American people to bring tin plate factories into existence 
if they are prepared to pay enough for them. We are a populous 



ONE CAMPAIGN BADGE. 67 

and a wealthy nation. We pay more than a million dollars a day 
into the federal treasury, to say nothing of the other millions a 
day that we pay to monopolies and trusts. If need be we can pay 
still other millions, and by concentrating our benefactions we can 
create a dozen or more tin plate millionaires exactly as we created 
a dozen Union Pacific railway millionaires. But let it be done, if 
done at all, openly and in the broad light of day. Let no swindler 
assume as the people's hard-earned money begins to roll into his 
coffers in a golden stream that there is any magic about it or that 
his enrichment at the expense of the multitude is in anywise re- 
markable, for it is not. The only noteworthy thing about the 
whole business is the astounding fact that the men and women 
whose earnings are thus filched to create a few more aristocrats, 
will join in the celebration of their own enslavement and then 
mock the wiser and better men who warn them against their own 

folly. 

The tin gew-gaw as used by the protective tariff thief is a badge 
of servility, not of triumph ; a mark of shame, not of victory ; a 
brand of infamy, not of glory. And when proudly and joyously 
worn it can be regarded only as the emblem of an ignominy 
boastfully assumed and brazenly paraded — a proclamation to all 
would-be-oppressors of men that here in free America there is a 
class glad of bondage and swift to kiss the hand that smites. 



JOHN BULL'S RED COAT. 



The memories of the American people who are in any manner 
influenced in favor of class privilege by the monopoly tariff "argu- 
ment" that British interests are arrayed on the side of democracy 
and free trade must be short indeed. 

Forty years ago the slave-owners of the south and their attor- 
neys in the north had no more effective cry than that which rel.ted 
to "foreign interference." In England, as in the United Stales, 
there were good and brave men whose sense of justice was 
outraged by the doctrine of human bondage and who faced mobs 
and invited ostracism by speaking and writing against the great 
iniquity of the time. Some of them appeared in this country to as- 
sist in the abolition movement, but the storm of prejudice which 
they aroused among the ignorant and bigoted was so overpowering 
that they were compelled to abandon their efforts. It was clear 
that they did more harm than good. 

The slave-owner who could not win a recruit in favor of his 
own particular villainy on its merits had no difficulty in arraying 
thousands against the idea of "British dictation," and the friends 
of freedom both here and in England saw at once that the battle 
must be fought out in America without even the moral support of 
the handful of English emancipators. During the ten years that 
preceded the slaveholders' rebellion no one idea became more 
firmly fixed in the minds of many Americans than that all Eng- 
land, its government as well as its people, was eagerly awaiting 
the abolition of slavery here and expecting to profit by it. The 
plantation bosses and their agents filled the land with lies about 
British interests and British interference. They accused honest 
Americans in whose veins coursed the blood that was tested at 
Concord, Bunker Hill and Saratoga, of " selling out for British 
gold," and they made many foolish men believe that it was hardly 

68 



JOHN BULVS RED COAT. 69 

safe to do away with a great crime because John Bull stood ready- 
to take advantage of them if they did. 

What was the result ? The confederate armies, raised for the 
single purpose of perpetuating the slavery barbarism, had no more 
than taken the field when there issued from British ports British 
ships armed with British guns, supplied with British stores and 
manned to some extent by British subjects— ships which bore the 
lebel flag high above their loftiest canvas and to which every port 
in the world, save British ports, was closed, and these ships— to 
all intents and purposes British ships— proceeded to make war 
upon northern commerce in behalf of the very interest which had 
asked the north to believe that Great Britain wanted nothing else 
so much as the freedom of the slaves. That was the actual result 
of the " British interference " scare of forty years ago. The man 
who voted for slavery in 1850 or 1852 because he thought England 
wanted emancipation probably discovered in 1861-4 what England 
wanted when England itself spoke in place of the paid alarmists in 
the service of the corrupt slave-owners' combine of the south. 

The "foreign interference " bugaboo is generally the last resort 
of the defenders of a great wrong. England itself has had fre- 
quent experiences with such panics, the last of any note occurring 
about fifty years ago, when its own protected class untjertook to 
frighten its people with the specter of German and French pau- 
per labor. England's free trade struggle was waged chiefly over 
the corn laws which taxed foreign breadstuffs for the protection 
of the landed aristocrats. Starvation was common. Hunger was 
univirsal among the poor. Yet the attorneys for the British mon- 
opoly tariff" asked the famishing millions of that country the same 
questions that our own monopoly attorneys ask of the American 
people : " Do you want to be flooded with the pauper grain of the 
continent?" and " Don't you know that the men who want to take 
the monopoly tariff" tax from food are in the pay of the Germans 
and the French ?" Every other country that has made any progress 
whatever against the impudent pretensions and the outrageous 
oppressions of the privileged classes has had to contend with just 
such "scares," and just such falsehoods. 



70 JOHN BULL'S It ED COAT. 

The assertion that there is anything distinctively American 
about our monopoly tariff is a lie, known to be a lie by every plun- 
derer who utters it. We got our protective tariff from England 
exactly as we got our slavery from England. "We were asked to 
keep the black slave system to spite England exactly as we are 
now asked to keep the white tMriff slave system to spite England, 
when, in truth, England as England cared nothing for our enlight- 
enment on the one question and probably cares less for our posi- 
tion on the other. It has outgrown and discarded slavery and pro- 
tectionism itself. Why should we cling to either of them, know- 
ing them to be vicious, with the idea that we are making anybody 
else miserable ? 

As a matter of fact there is no such thing as British money, 
American mone}' and German money. Money is money the world 
over. British money, so called, is invested in American protected 
industries. American money, so called, is invested in English free 
trade industries. Money takes care of itself. Greed takes care of 
itself. The sympathies of power and privilege are ever with 
power and privilege, no matter in what section of the earth they 
may be encountered. English aristocrats favor American aristo- 
crats, and English royalty would be more elated over the setting 
up of Am^ican royalty than it would be by the conquest of a new 
empire. So in the walks of real morality, real philanthropy, real 
progress, real liberty, the noble men who love justice and truth, 
whether they live in England or in Russia, in France or in Aus- 
tralia, sympathize with and bid god-speed to people everywhere 
who are striving for the rights of men. In all such they recognize 
brethren worthy of encouragement and entitled to support. 

It was men of this class in England, a few of them, who brought 
down upon the heads of the early abolitionists the ignorant wrath 
of brutal pro-slavery mobs in America — mobs that afterward 
learned that a few unselfish thinkers did not speak for the real Eng- 
land. It is men of this class, not only in England but in every 
land on earth where antiquated injustice is hated and free thought 
tolerated, who view with interest and hope the struggle in America 
of the masses against the classes. 



TAXATION AND LIBERTY. 



The great battles for liberty have been fought on questions of 
taxation. The English revolution grew out of a question of taxa- 
tion involving an important principle, but a small amount of 
money. The American revolution, forever glorious, was precipi- 
tated by a question of taxation. The French revolution grew out 
of the long-continued abuse of the taxing power by the kings and 
nobles of that country. In all lands and in all times, wherever and 
whenever a substantial gain has been made on the side of human 
rights and constitutional liberty, it has been usually the direct re- 
sult of popular uprisings against unjust taxation. The fiery spirit 
that sustained Simon Montfort's first house of burgesses in Eng- 
land, that inspired the followers of John Hampden, who rebelled 
against the ship tax, that actuated the continental congress in 
America and the states general in France, was awakened by gov- 
ernmental robbery carried on under the forms of taxation. 

A careful examination of the grievances leading up to these mo- 
mentous demonstrations in behalf of liberty will show that in no 
case, except that of France, was there any resemblance or the small- 
est approach to the monstrous inj ustice which the American govern- 
ment has now inflicted upon the people of this republic. John 
Hampden's ship money was but a few pence. The tax on tea con- 
sumed in the American colonies was a mere nothing. But the 
vicious principle was there, and in both cases it called forth armies 
of heroes to fight for its destruction. The fiscal system of France, 
in the years preceding the revolution was, of all the abuses here 
mentioned, the only one that proceeded on the same theoiy and to 
the same lengths as that which now obtains in this country. At 
the last there was no attempt to disguise the fact that the many 
were taxed for the benefit of the few. All pretense of justice had 
been abandoned. A small class of nobles lived in luxury. The 
mass of the people were in despair. As the disease was desperate, 

71 



72 TAXATION AND LIBERTY, 

the remedy was heroic. The many overthrew the few and 
ch()pi)ed their heads off, and the man who would now oppress 
France, and who values his life will, as a result of the lesson then 
taught, depend upon craft rather than upon divine right. 

Tariffs may be laid for revenue, or for protection, or for both. 
A tariff for revenue is a just tax, because its proceeds go into the 
public treasury to be used for the general welfare. A tariff for 
protection is a tax laid upon the people for the benefit of one man 
or a few men. It is an unjust tax because it is paid by the people 
not for a public purpose, not to sustain the government, not to 
promote the general welfare, but to enrich a favored class. This 
was the crime that brought about the terror in France and that set 
the guillotine at work upon the necks of the nobility. It is doubly 
a crime in this country, for Americans live under a written consti- 
tution, some of the objects of which, as set forth in the preamble, 
are to establish justice, to promote the general welfare and to 
secure the blessings of liberty. 

It is not forgotton, of course, that the class which profits by 
these American monopoly taxes has pretended to share the plun- 
der with labor, and that it has vociferously declared that agricult- 
ure is also benefited thereby, but we have seen this falsehood ex- 
posed in all its varying phases, exactly as the French people of the 
eighteenth century saw it exposed. Successful tyranny in France 
bred a generation of aristocrats and thieves, who forgot, if they 
ever knew, that it was necessary to apologize for oppression. 
The United States have not quite reached that level as yet, but 
they are approaching it. A few more purchased victories at the 
polls, a few more years of triumphant and glorified injustice, a 
few more shining examples of Carnegieism, and the tariff propa- 
ganda of robbery will become an institution whose supporters will 
accept hereditary privilege as a matter of course, and which, 
instead of wasting time in an effort to convince the people that the 
system is of value to them, will set about the pleasant task of 
hanging men who dare to assail their "vested rights." That is the 
solemn prospect ahead of us. 

The object for which the United States government was insti- 
tuted has been lost sight of in the scramble of members of this 



TAXATION AND LIBERTY. "73 

thieving class for lawa calculated to promote their own selfish 
interests. It is true that they maintain with diminishing evidences 
of sincerity that they seek the good of all, but is it possible lougei 
to deceive any rational human being on that point? Does it stand 
to reason that these thronging lobbyists, these vote buyers, these 
corruptionists, ever give a thought to the man of toil, on whose 
back all of these splendid largesses rest at last? Did Dubarry and 
Pompadour take into account the starving peasant of the Rhone, 
the Loire or the Garonne? Does the tariff-enriched lumber baron 
care for the pinched farmer on the treeless plains of Nebraska, 
Kansas or Dakota? Did Louis' brilliant court know of the exist- 
ence of the wretches who haunted the garrets of Paris and Lyons? 
Does the tariff-pampered manufacturer of glass, of wool, of cotton, 
of crockery, of implements, of cutlery or of iron and steel, devote 
one thought to the honest and laborious men who till the broad 
acres of Illinois, Missouri, Iowa or Wisconsin? We know better. 
As in France one hundred years ago, the palace is robbing the 
hovel; injustice stalks defiantly in every pathway, and greed con- 
siders only its own vicious desires and promotes only its own 
selfish interests. 

Much has been heard of late about the facts of protection, the 
statistics of protection, the truths of protection. There is but one 
fact of protection, and that is immutable and certain. Theft is 
theft. Injustice is injustice. Oppression is oppression. These 
things cannot be wiped out or explained away. These things are 
fundamental in the system which is now at the bar of human intel- 
ligence. These things are its sole recommendations to the villains 
who grow rich and powerful by reason of it. Stripped of all cant 
and deceit, all hypocrisy and falsehood, they furnish the American 
people with the most powerful motive for a political revolution 
that has been presented to them since the repeal of the Missouri 
compromise. 



PROTECTIONISM'S STUPENDOUS BRIBES. 



Monopoly protectionism proceeds on the theory that every man 
has his price. It buys industries. It buys individuals. It buys 
states. It buys congresses. Vote buying is the natural and nec- 
essary result of a policy which begins with bribery, is sustained 
by bribery and reaches its most notable triumphs through bribery. 

Protectionism itself is but a monstrous bribe. It was the price 
demanded by and paid to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania for 
their support of the republican party. Perceiving the necessity 
of having re-enforcements, it bribed lumber and salt, copper and 
glass, crockery and cutlery, wool and sugar. Recognizing also 
the importance of fortifying its injustice still further, it offered a 
colossal bribe to labor and another to agriculture, well knowing 
that it could not pay. but hoping to secure by deception and false- 
hood what it could not otherwise obtain at all. 

The flimsy pretense exposed and denounced everywhere by its 
intended victims, that protectionism exists for the benefit of labor, 
was intended as a bribe to the workingmen of America. Protec- 
tionism said to labor: "Vote my ticket and I will raise your 
wages out of the plunder that I am enabled by unjust laws to take 
from agriculture," That was a bribe worthy of a penitentiary 
sentence— a bribe that escaped vulgarity only by the enormity of 
the scoundrelism that lay behind it and the magnitude of the 
interests involved. That was a bribe more wicked than any 
against which a statute runs and one which should have shocked 
the moral sense of a nation of savages. 

Having failed in its efibrts at the wholesale debauchery of 
workingmen, protectionism next turned its attention to agriculture, 
its chief victim. It said to the farmer: "I perceive that all of 
this time you have been overlooked. Singularly enough, nobody 
has thought of you. Manufacturers and workingmen are protected 
and prosperous. You are poor. If you will vote my ticket I will 

74 



PROTECTIONISM'S STUPENDOUS BRIBES. 1^ 

lay a tariff on wheat and corn and rye and barley and eggs. The 
tariff has made us rich, we admit. It will do the same by you." 
With one exception that was the most colossal bribe ever offered 
on this planet. When Satan on a high mountain pointed out to 
the Lord the kingdoms of the earth and said: "All these will I 
give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me," he proposed a 
bribe no more impossible of delivery than that with which pro- 
tectionism tempts the farmer. The earth is the Lord's and the 
fullness thereof. The plunder of protectionism is the devil's own 
and he divides it with nobody. 

The bribe offered to agriculture was made at the eleventh hour 
by a doomed system which had all along oppressed agriculture on 
the pretense that it benefited workingmen employed in manufac- 
tures, and was palpably suggested to deceive an interest that was 
already groaning under oppression and injustice. So far as that 
proffered bribe was believed to be genuine it was in every respect 
the most corrupt proposition ever made by a governing class. So 
far as it was known to be a swindle it was the most contemptible 
trick ever played by a political party. It is the last desperate ad- 
venture of an institution which has thrived on the toil and priva- 
tion of farmers and which has done more than anything else to 
bring into disrepute an occupation pursued by a majority of the 
American people. 

Wherever an industry or an individual is found clinging to 
protectionism for profit that industry or that individual has been 
bribed. Wherever an industry or an individual is found clinging 
to protectionism for imaginary profit that industry or that individ- 
ual has been beguiled and duped. Protectionism buys the great 
and the small. It scorns nothing but justice and honesty. The 
monsters of iron and steel, lumber and copper, coal and glass, lie 
down cheerfully and peacefully with the brats of sugar and lead, 
pearl buttons and tin cups. Nothing that will steal and will help 
it to steal, be its power ever so puny, is too insignificant to be 
ignored. Every selfish interest, every corrupt scheme, from the 
cheap silver crankery of the far west to the murderous importa- 
tion of cholera-infected rags by the protected paper and shoddy 



76 PROTECTIONISM'S STUPENDOUS BRIBES. 

makers of the far east, allies itself with this strumpet as naturally 
as the woman of Babylon attracted liars, whoremongers, thieves 
and sorcerers. 

From the bribery and the attempted bribery of whole industries, 
trades and occupations, of districts, states and sections, to the 
purchase of the votes of needy or depraved Americans is a step 
that offers no obstacle to the congenial infamy of protectionism. 
The bait that this sj'^stem holds out to capital is unjust laws and 
privilege. The bait that it offers its deluded victim is a bank note. 
At one end of the scale of bribery is the man of means consider- 
ing the question : "Will this wrongdoing pay ?" At the other end 
is the wretch in whose mind may still linger some memory of a 
better citizenship considering the question, as he fingers the dirty 
bribe offered for his vote : " Will it pay ? " We need not wonder 
at the great corruption funds employed by protectionism in the so- 
called doubtful states, for an institution born in the greed of a 
class and nurtured in bribery must at the last, where universal 
suffrage prevails, depend for its life upon its ability to buy the 
support of the individual. It is this imperative necessity which 
has compelled the monopoly party once in four years to search the 
continent over for a man corrupt enough to manage its campaign 
and smart enough to keep himself and his backers out of the peni- 
tentiary. It is this necessity which has divested our political 
discussions of their picturesque features and reduced them to the 
sordid level of an old time vendue. 

If these conditions do not present to the minds of intelligent 
and patriotic men a moral question transcending in importance 
anything that relates to ordinary partisanship or economics it is 
because the great crime thus maintained with magnificent impu- 
dence has bewildered as well as corrupted the better nature of the 
people. The dollar is not all there is of life, even to the man who 
gets it. The astounding assertion by Mr. Depew that "the dollar 
is the only sacred thing in this country " is a libel on the manhood 
of the nation. The dollar is the god of monopoly. It must not 
be the sole inspiration of our politics and our government if a re- 
public of equal rights is to endure. 



FACE TO FACE WITH ITS PROMISES. 



Protectionism demands much from the American people and 
gives a little or nothing in return, exactly as it pleases. It de- 
mands as a right the privilege of taxing all for the benefit of a few. 
It makes certain promises of the great things that it will do, but 
these are forgotten as soon as it gains its own point. Even putting 
the best possible face upon its position, it has been seen that pro- 
tectionism, in spite of the monstrous advantages conferred upon it, 
is at liberty to ignore every engagement that it makes and that 
there is no way in which it can be compelled to live up to its part 
of the contract. 

In his letter accepting the Minneapolis nomination President 
Harrison expressed regret "that all employers are not just and 
considerate and that capital sometimes takes too large a share of 
the profits." The more conscientious defenders of slavery said 
the same thing. They regretted that all masters were not kind 
and that some of them were so brutal that humanity was outraged 
every day on some plantation in order that the greed or the passions 
of the ruling class might be the better served. 

Protectionism is the only American employer having a legal 
and public as well as a moral and private obligation to deal gen- 
erously with labor. It asks and receives public assistance on that 
very ground. It agrees to share its plunder with labor. It pro- 
claims its justness, its generosity and its philanthropy. Yet the 
publicly expressed "regret" of a president of the United States, 
committed to this detestable policy, is a notice to every American 
that in spite of the millions contributed to monopoly under protec- 
tion laws the payment of living wages depends wholly on the will 
of the emi)loyer. Like the slave-owner, he is master. He recog- 
nizes no contract written or implied. Of what possible use to 
workingmen is such a system ? 

77 



78 FACE TO FACE WITH ITS PROMISES. 

"When a committee of congress proceeded to Homestead, Pa., 
and asked for information as to wages and prices paid and received 
at that highly protected institution — an establishment which every 
man and woman in the United States has been taxed to support — 
its members were told that the matters asked for were none of their 
business. Homestead was a private affair, although two years 
before that it had agents at Washington making representations 
that it was a public affair deserving public assistance. Here was 
a denial of the commonly accepted doctrine that quasi-public 
institutions are subject to public supervision and control. A pri- 
vate individual who had never asked a favor from congress could 
not have stood more haughtily on his dignity than these glittering 
paupers and confidence men at Homestead did. They had begged 
and bullied and lied to the people's representatives in order to 
secure public assistance, but when the same representatives asked 
for information as to the manner in which these munificent bene- 
factions had been used they were told to go about their business. 
Of what conceivable value to the people is a system so one-sided 
as that ? 

The representations made to congress by protectionism when the 
McKinley bill was passed led the employes at Homestead to believe 
that their wages would be increased. The bill became a law and 
wages were reduced. The men who had been led to think that 
they would receive some of the plunder struck work and in some 
instances resorted to violence. Protectionism appealed to the 
courts, the benches of which in Pennsylvania are occupied as a 
rule by as pliant creatures of monopoly as this earth has ever 
known. What was the result ? Did the judges consider the prom- 
ises made by protectionism ? Did they so much as mention the 
moral obligation of protected employers to deal "justly and consid- 
erately" with the employed? Not at all. Chief Justice Paxton 
instructed the grand jury to bring in indictments against the 
strikers for treason, and defined the law as follows : 

"When the company shut down its works and discharged its men 
it was acting strictly in the lines of the law. It could not compel the 
men to work, nor could the men compel the company to employ 
them. No arrangement could be made in such regard except in 



FACE TO FACE WITH ITS PROMISES. 79 

the nature of a contract agreed upon by the parties. Upon this 
subject their rights were mutual." 

That is to say the rights of employer and employe under 
American law are exactly the same as they are under British "free 
trade" law. The employer may pay, and does pay, such wages as 
he pleases or as he must. If he can find men who will work 
cheaper than those now in his service are willing to work he may 
and he will dismiss the old and employ the new, and the law will 
sustain him in his purpose and in the execution of it, no matter to 
what extremity he may go. That is law which is necessary to the 
preservation of society. It is law which nobody except protection- 
ists undertakes to deny or to set aside. It is the law to which pro- 
tectionists themselves appeal when— all their lies exposed and all 
their swindling promises broken— they run to cover to escape the 
fury of their unhappy dupes. Of what value is a system which 
works but one way, which operates to the advantage of a few men, 
but which imposes no obligation whatever upon them to confer any 
of the advantages upon other men in whose behalf the whole 
mischievous scheme is falsely said to have been devised ? 

When old John Brown got it into his crazy head that human 
slavery could be abolished by the slaves themselves the state of 
Virginia arraigned him for treason, convicted him and hanged 
him. Virginia acted in that case for a proud slave-holding oligarchy 
which was as much interested in striking terror into the breasts of 
abolitionists elsewhere as it was in putting a fanatical old man out 
of the way. It suited Virginia's purpose to hang him for treason 
because that accusation lent a graver aspect to a crime that was 
more commonly known as murder. So now the state of Penn- 
sylvania, acting as truly to-day for the tariff oligarchy, and look- 
ing beyond the few wretches against whom its writs run, arraigns a 
score or more of the deceived, swindled, misguided, lawless work- 
ingmen at Homestead on the charge of treason and announces that 
thry will be tried under the king's jury system, a relic of Edward 
IV., which enables the state to pack the jury-box against the 
accused. The purpose of this proceeding is to intimidate work- 
ingmen. It is a notice to labor that protectionism will not divide 
its plunder. It is a warning to the toiler that protectionism gets 



80 FACE TO FACE WITH ITS PROMISES. 

and keeps ; that it does not arbitrate ; that it will not reason ; that 
it explains no lie, observes no promise and recognizes no law save 
that which is common to all. Over and above all this it is a proc'- 
lamation to free traders everywhere that protectionism in its 
Pennsylvania citadel regards them as traitors and their creed as 
treason, and that if it had the opportunity it would as cheerfully 
set its gallows at work upon them as Virginia did its own upon 
abolitionists in 1859. 

Face to face with its promises and its obligations, protectionism 
is as desperate and as murderous as, in the presence of the people 
whom it hopes to deceive, it is contemptible and corrupt. 



HONEST WEALTH VS. DISHONEST WEALTH. 



The dangerous propensities of protectionism should receive the 
most solemn consideration at the hands of that large and influential 
element in America which has achieved fortune through its own in- 
dustry and sagacity. Most of the wealthy men of this country owe 
their success in life to economy, perseverance and equal laws, 
which give every man an opportunity to improve his condition. 
The class that has been made rich by unjust laws is comparatively 
a small one, though its ostentation and impudence, its clamor and 
its crimes, have filled the country with its boasts and its infamy. 

It is possible that the natural tendency of men enjoying the 
same condii ions of wealth and power to come together in a com- 
mon interest has operated to make the honest riches of this coun- 
try too careless of the methods by which dishonest riches have 
been amassed. If so, the possessors of great fortunes honorably 
won cannot be warned with too much emphasis that the security 
which they enjoy, and the conditions which make the prizes they 
have gained worth having, rest alone upon the public sense of jus- 
tice and public confidence in the wisdom and equality of our laws. 
The honest wealth of the country, in a word, cannot afford to 
make common cause with the wealth that has been accumulated 
by deception, by theft, by starvation of labor, by intimidation and 
murder, by bribery, and by laws so shamefully unfair and unjust 
that a self-respecting American cannot witness their operation 
without feeling the spirit of rebellion rising within him. 

Protectionism, in its best possible phase, is the extremest form 
of socialism which America has ever known. When the hollow- 
eyed inhabitants of our garrets and cellars meet to demand that 
the rich shall divide with them, we have no hesitation in denomi- 
nating that manifestation of socialism "anarchy." When a parcel 
of sharpers who live by their wits assemble to demand that every- 
body, rich and poor, shall divide with them, we are in the habit of 

81 



83 HONEST WEALTH VS. DISHONEST WEALTH, 

calling that manifestation of socialism "protection." Every man 
of property may depend upon it that the mass of the people have 
seen through this thing. They vrill presently call things by their 
right names. When they do call things by their right names the 
moral question involved in the tariff struggle will be so plain that 
deceit will no longer be of service. When that time comes there 
will be a reckoning before a tribunal where lies will be swept away 
like chaff, and where the man who has shown no mercy will 
receive no mercy. 

Protectionism has created a privileged class in a republic which 
has guaranteed equal rights to all. It has brazenly seized upon 
every business interest, and endeavored by threats and falsehoods 
to persuade honest men to make common cause with it against its 
protesting victims. It has arrayed labor against capital in count- 
less places and with increasing vehemence, because it has fla- 
grantly broken its promises and boldly engaged in oppressions 
unknown in America before its day. It is based on a grotesque 
disregard of human nature and is the discredited exponent of a 
theory exploded in history and against which Democratic govern- 
ment is a standing protest — that the rich will take care of the poor. 
It has deceived, robbed and exasperated labor, until it has embit- 
tered the needy and spread desperation among the wretched. It 
has emphasized the class idea in a republic where all are equal, 
and on more than one occasion has precipitated strife that has 
amounted to civil war. It is as much the foe of honest wealth as 
it is the foe of honest toil, and the worst enemy of honest govern- 
ment. 

Dread of change is the sentiment which the disreputable rich 
employ to intimidate the reputable riches of the land. When all 
other "arguments" fail, the man of plunder and privilege asks the 
man whose fortune comprehends no stolen dollars if it is not wise 
to let well enough alone. Honest wealth should weigh this imper- 
tinent question well. Is it well enough to have the government of 
the United States in the hands of a piratical combination which is 
at war with every legitimate business interest? Is it well enough 
that a great political party has become the creature of these bucca- 
neers, using its power solely to further their greed? Is it well 



HONEST WEALTH VS. DISHONEST WEALTH. 83 

enough that the system which is thus maintained is perpetually 
degrading labor by importations of inferior races and filling the 
Jbreasts of hundreds of thousands of workingmen with the convic- 
tion that they are sulfering from injustice with which it is not in 
their power lawfully to contend? Is it well enough that this mo- 
nopoly class has debauched the ballot, assailed the sacred principle 
of parliamentary government and menaced the freedom of elec- 
tions, the better to maintain its hold upon the privileges that it has 
stolen? Is it well enough that there is growing up all over the 
country a belief that plunder and not justice is the controlling 
spirit of government? Is it well enough, finally, that these thieves 
couple themselves with all other men of wealth, and with match- 
less audacity proclaim the lie that attacks upon their wicked laws 
and their rotton riches are a menace to all laws and all riches? 
There need be no dread of any change which promises to strip 
these malefactors of their power and pretensions. There may, 
properly enough, be the gravest reasons for dreading the final con- 
sequences of apparently invincible injustice and oppression. 
There is security in impartial government. There is danger in 
every departure from it. We have had sufficient notice of the 
progress and the motive of this movement for the restoration of 
the constitution and the laws to their original purpose. That 
movement proceeds on lines of peace, justice and truth. No man 
can foretell the hour when, bursting the restraints which now gov- 
ern it, it may leap in maddened fury beyond the control of reason 
or of right. 

There can be no safety to honest wealth in a system which 
teaches all mankind that it is right for one class to prey upon an- 
other class. This is not a monarchy with a great standing army 
ready to do the bidding of a king whose will is the law. It is a re- 
public, the government of which derives all of its powers from the 
governed. At the ballot-box the man of millions and the man of 
poverty meet on the same level. The men of wealth are compara- 
tively few. The men who have no wealth are numerous. If the 
few rich may now oppress the many poor how long will it be be- 
fore the tables will be turned? This is a government of law. The 
dishonest rich have made these unjust laws. If the dishonest 



84 HONEST WEALTH VS. DISHONEST WEALTH. 

poor shall, in some dark and desperate hour, band together to 
spoil the wealth of the land, as the dishonest wealth has banded 
together to plunder industry, is there a man foolhardy enough to 
believe that they will lack the power to crystallize their ideas into 
law or that they will discriminate between individuals? If the 
motive to rob the many is strong in the breasts of the few, what 
will it be in the bosoms of the many when they come to apply the 
same savage doctrine to the few? The men who have accumulated 
fortunes honestly may depend upon it that this pendulum of injus- 
tice is likely to go as far in one direction as it has in another. 
That is a "change" which they may well dread. 

The men who own the honest wealth of this country, who do 
not steal, and who do not purchase laws from an abandoned party- 
ism, cannot afford to tolerate the men whose millions have been 
rolled up by methods which would shame a Nero. They have the 
most powerful incentive to repudiate and to destroy them. They 
do not need to be told that the next great struggle of civilization 
is to come over the relations between capital and labor. They 
know that portents of this momentous conflict are visible even now 
in every enlightened nation. Whether it is to be a battle of ideas 
or one in which rivers of blood shall run they cannot know, but of 
one thing they may be certain, and that is that the rage of that 
conflict will beat fiercest upon the nation which has most to 
answer for in the way of injustice and oppression. 



HISTORIC DEMOCRACY AND THE TARIFF. 



The supporters of the thieving system of protection are seeking 
to add the weight of a respectable name to their outrageous wrong- 
doing by declaring that Thomas Jefferson was a protectionist. In 
the same manner the men who gained wealth, power and position 
through the enslavement of the negro in America endeavored to 
sustain their vicious institution by the assertion that Washington, 
Jefferson and many other heroes of revolutionary times were 
slave-owners. 

Thomas Jefferson was not a protectionist, but, even if he were, 
the whole force of the gospel of the rights of man which he 
preached would have led as certainly to the overthrow of that 
system as it did to the destruction of human bondage. In Jeff- 
erson's time patriots were not menaced by great conspiracies in 
trade, commerce and manufactures. The tariffs of those days 
were so low and were so obviously for revenue and to so small an 
extent for protection that if they were to be re-enacted to-day it is 
probable that, deep-seated as public indignation now is, the move- 
ment against the protective system would soon die out. 

It is no more to be assumed that Jefferson would have favored 
the prostitution of the taxing power of the government with which 
this generation is familiar than that, though a slave-owner himself, 
he would have joined hands with the oligarchy which in 1850 
sought to extend that institution over the entire continent. In his 
day there was much senseless chatter about "fostering infant 
industries" and, like nearly all statesmen of that period, he can be 
quoted to that effect, but his whole life was a warfare against just 
such wrongs upon the people as have now taken refuge behind the 
monopoly tariff, and his writings are full of sentiments showing 
that his belief in the desirability of free commerce was of the most 
positive character. In point of fact he was assailed for many 
years as the enemy of mechanics and artificers because in a purely 

85 



86 HISTORIC DEMOCRACY AND THE TARIFF. 

speculative work he had expressed the hope that America would 
remain an agricultural nation, as he believed that the wretchedness, 
the vice and the helplessness of large numbers of men who 
depended for their bread upon the will of rich and domineering 
employers in the cities would prove dangerous to the liberties of a 
republic. Strained as this conclusion undoubtedly was, he never- 
theless had a strikingly clear vision of the misery of the modern 
starvation camps presided over by the genius of protection. 

The tariffs for revenue in Jefferson's day ranged from 8 to 20 
per cent. The tariffs for monopoly in our day range from 40 to 60 
per cent, and are highest on the necessaries of life, and lowest on 
the luxuries. In Jefferson's day the spirit that is now behind the 
tariff criaie was seeking by unjust laws to establish monarchical 
customs and tyrannous powers. It begged for titles and privilege. 
It undertook to make the people's servants their masters. It 
longed for gold braid, fine lace, scarlet robes, state carriages, 
processions, birthdays and other flummeries. It wanted to elect 
presidents and senators for life and to remove the people as far as 
possible from the officiils who were to rule over them. In a word, 
it would have nullified the declaration of independence and the 
constitution of the United States and have sacrificed to the greed 
of a pompous and purse-proud class all that had been gained on the 
fields of Saratoga and Yorktown. 

Against all of these pretenses Jefferson contended with the full 
force of his extraordinary faculties. He solidified the great de- 
mocracy. He made populargovernment glorious. He pulverized the 
party of aristocracy and privilege and left it at his death without so 
much as an organization or a name. If that odious party, now 
but a bad smelling memory, had set up a monop )ly tariff in Jeft'- 
erson's day, as its successor has done in this day, it would have 
gone down before the assaults of that peerless democrat exactly 
as it did in its championship of other and equally obnoxious forms 
of privilege and oppression. In point of fact, the great leaders of 
democracy in every generation have been compelled to face some 
new manifestation of the class idea in the opposition. Jefferson 
combated royalty, aristocracy, exclusiveness, tyranny. Jackson 
overthrew the bank monopoly and the money power. Van Buren 



HISTORIC DEMOCRACY AND THE TARIFF. 87 

led the democratic hosts to success on the issue of manhood 
suffrage. Douglas threw down the gage of battle to slavery. 
Tilden denounced the infamies of the monopoly tariff system and 
Cleveland has nobly followed in his footsteps. 

In all of these momentous struggles for popular rights each one 
of these democrats has done exactly what every other one would 
have done under the circumstances and in the same place. Grover 
Cleveland in 1800 would not more certainly have assailed the alien 
and sedition laws and the aristocratic trumpery of the federalists 
than Thomas Jefferson, if alive to-day, would attack and destroy 
the bondage which a privileged class has thrown upon American 
industry. These evils fasten themselves upon the nation as disease 
does upon the human body. While their motive is ever the same, 
they manifest themselves in different ways. They cannot be 
destroyed at once. They must be fought singly. The victim of 
fever is not treated for rheumatism, though rheumatism may attack 
him later on if his life be spared. Jefferson and Jackson dealt 
with the wrongs of their time and subdued them, as their disciples 
of to-day must deal with and conquer the errors that confront them. 

Though they werd slave-owners themselves, the voices of 
Washington and Jefferson were potent for liberty. Though many 
of the early democrats sometimes took up the idle jargon of the 
day about "infant industries," their words and their lives will be 
powerful forever as against the degrading dogma that one man 
may oppress many men to the advantage of all. 



REPUBLICANISM AND ROBBERY. 



The republican party was not organized as a monopoly tariff 
party. It is the successor of the great war party, which was made 
up of democrats, whigs and abolitionists, and which had but one 
distinctive principle — the preservation of the Union and the de- 
struction of slavery. During the ten years preceding the war of 
the rebellion there was no monopoly tariff party in this country. 
The question had been settled in favor of a tariff for revenue, and, 
though there still existed men who would have been glad to profit 
by unjust laws and unequal taxation, apolitical party would as 
soon have declared in favor of larceny and counterfeiting as to 
have indorsed the exposed swindles and oppressions of a tariff 
mainly for protection. 

Little by little, however, as death and deflection removed from 
the republican party its leaders of brains and character, most of 
them original democrats, the platform declarations of its conven- 
tions became more and more pronounced in favor of monopoly. 
From a party having but a single idea of liberty it passed by easy 
stages to a party having but a single idea of tyranny. Its first tariff 
was for war. Its second tariff was for deception. Its later tariffs 
have been for robbery undisguised. 

In many of the states where the republican party has been 
strongest it was for twenty 3'ears a low tariff or a revenue tariff" 
party. Never until 1888, when the mill owners and railroad attor- 
neys monopolized most of the seats in the convention, did a na- 
tional assemblage of republicans fail to promise tariff reduction 
in the interest of the people. At that time, when the great leaders 
of the party had all disappeared, and when the Blaines, Claytons, 
Dorseys, Dudleys, Thurstons, Forakers, Spooners, Elkinses, Car- 
negies, Davenports, Clarksons, Quays, Egans, Lemons, Paynes, 
Mahones and Sawyers became the sole leaders of Republicanism, 
the declaration was made that, in spite of twenty years of reform 

88 



BEPUBLICANISM AND ROBBERY. 8\ 

promises by Republican conventions, the organization would 
proclaim free whisky and free tobacco rather than remit one 
cent of the tariff taxes for monopoly. 

Up to that time thousands of lesser republicans here and there 
had followed their earlier leaders in demanding tariff reform and 
tax reduction. Several great republican states in the west had 
already spoken their minds on this subject. But from that mo- 
ment no man could so much as question the propriety of taxing all 
of the people for the benefit of a few of the people without bring- 
ing upon himself the most overpowering attacks of a compact and 
intolerant organization of plunderers. Free speech in the repub- 
lican party has been as completely silenced at the behest of its 
Carnegies as ever it was in the south at the command of the slave- 
drivers. A free press is also uukuowu. Such newspapers as have 
not been bullied have been bought with office, and there is not in 
the United States to-day a republican journal that dare so much 
as question the propriety of the infamous policy which its party 
has fastened upon the people. 

What does this terrorism mean? What is the cause of the intel- 
lectual and moral paralysis that has fallen upon the men who but 
a few years ago did not hesitate to assert their disapproval of mo- 
nopoly taxation? Timidity and cowardice and greed ! Why were 
conscientious southerners silent during the last ten years of 
slavery's increasing arrogance? Why were law-abiding men mute 
during the last few months of the reign of San Francisco's vigil- 
ance committee? They were terrorized, exactly as self-respecting 
republicans now are terrorized. Desperate causes are supported 
by desperate men. The tariff has brought the highwayman into 
politics. Thethiev^es and liars who have made common cause with 
the swollen monopolists that this tariff has bred will tolerate no 
opposition under the name of republican. They come of a family 
that kills. All that is brutal, ignorant and selfish is arrayed in 
their interest against common fairness, enlightened thought and 
independence. 

Republicanism as it exists to-day is in open alliance with a 
small and determined gang of lariff plunderers, who have made 
their one criminal idea the controlling purpose of the republican 



90 BE PUBLIC ANISM AND B0BBEB7. 

party. Never was a partnership taore palpable; never an unworthy 
motive more obvious. Yet the men who resisted the earlier 
efforts of this grasping class to fasten itself upon their party are 
speechless to-day in the presence of villainy accomplished. 
They saw the McKinley law sold in advance for money contributed 
by monopolists to their party's corruption fund and they made no 
protest. They were dumb when that infamous measure was 
drawn, passed and signed with the choicest aggregation of thieves 
outside of the penitentiaries looking eagerly on. They are voice- 
less now when similar bargains and sales of the people's rights are 
being made in the same interest. If there is an honest tongue in 
the republican party to-day that tongue is silenced. 

No republican ventures to question the propriety of the policy 
thus entered upon. Of the hosts of Republicans who once stood 
out against the demands of monopoly, or who yielded to them with 
reluctance, not one, speaking as a republican, is now bold enough 
to call a halt. Among thieves the man of conscience has no 
place. In the twenty years preceding the passage of the McKinley 
bill such republicans as John A. Kasson, Henry Cabot Lodge, 
John D. Long, Knute Nelson, Joseph H. Walker, Ben Butterworth, 
Frank Hiscock, George F. Edmunds, Preston B. Plumb, Henry L. 
Dawes, John A. Logan, Joseph R. Hawley, John J. Ingalls, Eu- 
gene Hale, Justin S. Morrill, William B. Allison, Henry W. Blair, 
O. S. Ferry, Hugh McCulloch, Charles J. Folger, John Sherman, 
Chester A. Arthur, William M. Evarts, James A. Garfield, Jere M. 
Rusk and Ulysses S. Grant on occasion wrote, spoke or voted 
against the monopoly tariff idea. Now not one of them who is 
still living and affiliating with republicanism utters so much as a 
word against the great wrong which he knows is undermining free 
government and making a mockery of our vaunted justice and 
equality. 

Is apolitical disease such as this to be cured? Are offenders of 
this sort capable of reform? Can a party which strangles free 
thought and free speech, and which shackles a free press in the 
interest of monopolized industry and commerce, be safely trusted 
to administer the government of a free republic? 



COUNTING THE COST. 



There cannot be much doubt that a great majotity of the 
American people have been convinced of the immorality of pro- 
tectionism. They know it is wrong. They suspect that it is 
wicked. But many of them still cling to the belief that it pays. 

To that large element, therefore, which would sacrifice country, 
liberty, family and conscience if profit were to be made by the 
operation, let it be said that in this case there are the best of 
reasons for the belief that to do right will be to do one's self a 
service. If there ever was a time when honesty was the best 
policy that time is now at hand. If it ever paid to do right the 
man who must see money in everything that he undertakes may 
be assured that the day and the issue are favorable to the greatest 
gain as the result of doing the greatest good. 

It is one of the crimes of protectionism, as it was of slavery, 
that it has made wrongdoing respectable and fashionable. The 
men who have scourged the people most heartlessly have been set 
at the posts of honor and the rapacity of the favored few has 
communicated itself to thousands of smaller money getters who 
have scrupled at nothing that promised gain. We have seen a 
Reed, fresh from usurpations in the house of representatives 
which in earlier times would have cost a less impudent tyrant his 
head, received with rapturous applause by foolish thousands. We 
have seen a McKinley, whose treason to the American common- 
wealth in bartering its liberties and its substance to the lords of 
protection is as heinous as Benedict Arnold's ever was, exploited 
in thirty states as a disinterested statesman and patriot. We have 
seen a Harrison, the advocate and the proposed beneficiary of the 
force bill, a measure so revolutionary in its character as to alarm 
even his own friends, hailed everywhere as a safe and a good man. 
We have had a Carnegie and a Wanamaker, one with blood and 
the other with the indelible stain of bribe money on his hands, in 

91 



92 OOUKTINO THE COST. 

the front seats of our Sunday-schools and lyceums and sometimes 
in the pulpits of our churches. And all the time not one preacher 
in 10,000 has ventured to proclaim what he knew to be the truth, 
that these men and the wretches who stood behind them were to 
be loathed, not praised — to be denounced to their faces, not com- 
mended and praised by sycophants and hypocrites. What wonder, 
then, that there has grown up in the minds of millions the 
conviction that gain is legitimate no matter how secured, or that 
millions of others, seeing their error clearly, nevertheless ask 
themselves, when challenged by their consciences, "Will right- 
doing pay?" 

No other country ever was invited by more alluring promises of 
profit into paths of honor and justice than those which are held up 
to the eyes of Americans to-day. There are many reasons to 
believe that the destruction of the wicked policies and systems 
which now afflict and menace our prosperity and our peace would 
result beneficially to the whole country and there is absolutely no 
reason to apprehend that that annihilation would damage a single 
honest man or honest industry. When the time came for slavery 
to go we did not consider the profit and the loss. It went with the 
blessing of Almighty God upon the people who were resolute 
enough to sweep it away, and the mercy and the forgiveness of 
the same infinite being led the misguided men responsible for it 
through defeat and despair to a prosperity greater than they had 
ever known. So now the sure path to national tranquility and 
development, to popular content and individual profit is as certain- 
ly indicated in the storm that threatens the downfall of class 
privilege as the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night 
guided the feet of the Israelites out of the land of bondage. 

Necessary taxation may be cheerfully borne because its proceeds 
are applied for the good of all. Economically administered, 
government need not be a burden to any man. Unnecessary 
taxation — that is, taxation beyond the needs of the public service — 
is unwise and unjust, because, after its own wants have been 
supplied, no government can employ the people's money so 
profitably as the people themselves. Class taxation — that is, the 
taxation of all of the people for the benefit of a few of the 



COUNTING THE COST. 93 

people — is unmitigated robbery, and, when carried on under the 
lying pretense that it is advantageous to all, it is a crime of such 
magnitude that no government drawing its inspiration from the 
people can long afford to countenance it. The American people are 
staggering under 1 his class taxation to-day. It costs them h undreds 
of millions annually. It takes these millions from men and women 
and children who need them and bestows them upon a few 
occupants of castles here and elsewhere who do not need them. 
It withdraws these hundreds of millions every year from the daily 
walks of the men whose toll produces them. It takes coats from 
honest men's backs, it snatches blankets from the bed where 
exhausted labor rests, it steals shoes and stockings from the feet of 
little children as sweet and tender as any that are reared in the 
homes of protected millionaires, it invades the humble parlor and 
purloins a chair and as it stalks past the meager board and the 
scanty larder it seizes a plate and grabs a loaf. 

No honest man need doubt that the utter destruction of this 
vicious principle will result in the widest possible good to the 
inhabitants of this country. Its real beneficiaries are few indeed. 
Its victims are many. Every decrease in taxation on the necessaries 
of life results in an enormous increase in their consumption, 
showing that there had been national self-denial when the tax was 
operative. When quinine was put on the free list and the price 
fell the consumption of the drug increased many fold, showing 
that even in sickness there was national self-denial. When some 
brands of sugar were admitted free of tax the decrease in price 
caused an immediate increase in consumption, showing that the 
people had never had sugar enough and that they had denied them- 
selves to pay the tax. In seventy -five per cent of the homes of self- 
supporting Americans to-day there is need of more blankets, more 
clothing, more stockings, more shoes, more shawls, more glassware, 
more crockery, more tinware, more everything. Self-denial has 
asserted itself as monopoly taxation has risen. Taxation for the 
benefit of a class has thus smitten every humble home with a curse. 

Take the unjust taxes from the necessaries and see the new life 
that will manifest itself in all productive industries. Break up the 
greedy combinations which greet willing labor with closed doors 



94 COUNTING THE COST. 

and the intending purchaser with a rising price. Open to the 
American the markets of the earth and consider no man who would 
exchange commodities with him as an enemy or aa inferior. Cast 
out the devils who have brought starvation and ruin at home and 
abroad upon industries which they have coveted and whose 
destruction they have wrought by inhuman laws. Put the stigma 
of ineffaceable shame upon the men who for so long a time have 
deceived and betrayed the people. If there be no profit in such a 
course then all morality, all justice, is vain and the objects that 
civilization pursues are phantoms. 



THE MAN AND THE HOUR. 



Less than a year before Abraham Lincoln signed his name to 
the emancipation prochimation he stated publicly and privately 
that if he could save the Union without freeing a slave he would 
do it. Let the people who sometimes grow impatient of the timid- 
ity of politicians bear this fact in mind. It is worth consideration. 

Mr. Lincoln was nominated in 1860 on a platform that dealt 
with slavery much more tenderly than the platform on which Mr. 
Cleveland was nominated in 1892 dealt with the kindred crime of 
protectionism, yet his term of office was not half spent when he 
put his hand to the preliminary proclamation. Let the people who 
sometimes weary of the slowness with which their political chief- 
tains move bear this fact in mind. It also merits consideration. 

This country is nearer the downfall of class rule to-day than it 
appears to be, just as slavery was nearer its doom in 1860 than 
anybody then dared to hope. Lincoln hated slavery as fiercely as 
the abolitionists did, but he was too keen a politician to proclaim 
the fact. His speeches and writings during the campaign, his 
utterances after his election and his inaugural address may be 
searched in vain for a single word that could have given genuine 
comfort to the men who had vowed that the curse of slavery 
should be wiped out; yet events were so ordered by a power to 
which nations as well as individuals must bow that before a sin- 
gle presidential term had expired the republic, speaking through 
him, had decreed that henceforth its soil should know neither 
master nor slave. 

The politicians do not rule this country. They do not even 
lead the people. It is the people who lead the politicians. It is 
the people who rule the country. The wise statesman does not go 
faster than the people are going, but he takes care to keep up with 
them. Mr. Lincoln was enough of a democrat to know that with- 
out popular support he was nothing. He knew that the people 

95 



96 THE MAW AND THE HOUR. 

•noved slowly, but that when they did move they were as irresistible 
as an avalanche. He was content to wait, and when all things were 
propitious he acted with a decision that knew no such thing as 
expediency and a courage that disarmed even the fears of others. 

It took time and suffering to convince the American people that 
slavery had to go. They had juggled with the question and com- 
promised with wrong for so long a period that millions of them, 
although entirely conscious of the error, were nevertheless incapa- 
ble of supporting a policy that looked to its complete extermina- 
tion. A hundred considerations were urged against precipitate 
action. But there came a time when it was apparent to all that a 
long step forward must be taken, and when that hour struck a 
man was found who had the wisdom correctly to interpret the 
popular will and the firmness properly to execute it. There were 
no more refinements of villainy after that. From that moment on 
until the last shackle was broken no man weighed words in char- 
acterizing slavery, or with nicely selected phrases attempted to 
bewilder the people as to the fate that was reserved for it. Plain 
speech was all sufficient then. The doom of slavery was written 
on every starry banner and was echoed around the earth from the 
smoking muzzles of a thousand guns. 

Face to face now with a similar wrong, the people of America, 
many of whom long since saw the folly of compromise and con- 
cession, may occasionally bewail the extreme caution of men to 
whom they look for the ardent championship of right, but let 
them be patient. Even now the lines are well advanced. The 
enemy makes no mistake as to the purpose of his assailants. He 
knows what sentence it is that has been passed upon him. The 
impatient and the impetuous can afford to cherish the faith which 
the plunderer himself makes no attempt to conceal. Privilege and 
anti-privilege understand each other. The fine words and diplo- 
matic equivocations of politicians should not dishearten the zeal- 
ous foe of monopoly when it is plain enough that they no longer 
quiet the apprehensions of the thieves who perceive in every 
studied sentence and every well-chosen word the confident deter- 
mination of honest men to destroy them and the unjust system by 
which they have profited so long. 



THE MAN AND THE HOUR. 97 

Whatever democratic chieftains may say or do, the people 
know the meaning of the words "a tariff for revenue only." They 
know that they mean trade wholly free from the unjust impositions 
of monopoly. They know that the country is going to bring up at 
that point before this question can be regarded as settled. They 
are aware that before much progress can be made the old whigs, 
the ignoramuses and the would-be thieves in the democratic 
party must be forced out of a political association that is to be 
made more and more uncomfortable for them, and that their 
places will be filled by accessions of honest and courageous men 
from other parties, and they are in possession of ocular evidence 
that this sifting-out process is well under way already. 

All things considered, there is no occasion for impatience. The 
movement against protectionism is gaining momentum every day. 
Politicians who dodge and straddle and explain, chiefly through 
ignorance, cannot control it. It will control them. The wise man, 
reading the portents correctly, will put his house in order, for the 
country is soon to enter upon a new and better era. The fool who 
resists and expostulates will be overrun and trampled under foot. 



A DEMOCRAT IN EARNEST. 



It was said of Thomas Jeflferson that he was "a democrat in 
earnest." He meant all that he said. When he had power he 
used it to further the ends that he had in view when he was not in 
power. The blandishments of wealth, society and so-called re- 
spectability had no effect upon him. He boldly proclaimed a pur- 
pose to give the declaration of independence living force, and 
when in office he as boldly did what he said he would do. 

The country needs to-day the services of another democrat in 
earnest, and he will need the moral and political support of several 
millions of democrats in earnest. Democratic success at the polls 
imposes upon the party of Jefferson the gravest responsibility ihat 
it has had to meet since the days of its great founder. It is charged 
with the duty of revivifying and giving practical force to the doc- 
trines which alone have made possible the grandeur of the repub- 
lic. Many of the ideas on which democratic government was 
based have become inoperative. Through the aggressions of a 
class we have been led away from the safe and simple rule be- 
queathed to us by immortal patriots and have taken on ourselves 
the injustices and discriminations which scandalize and threaten 
the worn-out despotisms of Europe. The only prudent course 
open to the people is to return to the first principles of democracy 
and with uncompromising firmness cut away every new growth 
which does not harmonize with their everlasting truths. 

It is not to be expected that all of the so-called democrats of the 
country are virtuous enough >nd courageous enough to pursue these 
reforms to the end. Many democrats are protectionists in principle. 
When the old whig party dissolved, a large percentage of its mem- 
bers came into the democratic party and have remained there. They 
have sympathized with its position on most questions, but they never 
have been in accord with it on the subject of taxation. So long as 
democratic platforms on the tariff meant nothing they were 

98 



A DEMOCRAT IN EARNEST. 99 

satisfied. Since these platforms have been inspired with truth and 
courage they have manifested an uneasiness which is easily to be 
accounted for. In all human probability the democratic party 
cannot proceed to the execution of its purpose to sweep away the 
class idea in politics without first encountering and subduing oppo- 
sition and treachery in its own ranks. The old whigs now masquer- 
ading as democrats will leave the party of equal rights the moment 
they discover that it is a democracy in earnest. 

There can be no eflfective reformation of this government on 
the lines laid down by Jefferson in the declaration of independence 
that does not go to the root of the abuses which monopolistic 
greed and injustice have nourished. Any half-way measures will 
amount to nothing, for so long as life remains in the system whose 
overthrow is now impending there will be no security against its 
awakened avarice and its recuperated strength. To be of lasting 
benefit, to reflect glory upon its leaders and to relieve the people 
of a vexatious and dangerous error, the reform must be so radical 
as to make similar wrongdoing forever odious. The principle in- 
volved in the proposition that one class may prey upon another 
class must itself be destroyed or victories now won can have no 
permanent or far-reaching effect. Monopoly protectionism has 
not risen above the level reached by Mr, Depew when he declared 
the dollar to be the one thing sacred to Americans. The new re- 
form must show to the world the falsity of ihis slander. It can do 
■ so in no other way so well as by splendid deeds of justice that 
shall proclaim to the uttermost parts of the earth the truth that 
American manhood cannot be corrupted by American dollars. 

When Mr. Lincoln came to deal with slavery there were men 
who had followed him that far who then turned back. They were 
willing to check slavery. They were willing to cripple it. They 
were willing to strip it of some of its power. But they were not 
willing to have it destroyed. So now the democrat in earnest 
who comes to deal with the kindred wrong of protectionism may 
expect that when his serious purpose to tear down and to extermi- 
nate shall be made plain many people who will have followed him 
to that point will turn back in affright. They will be ready to com- 
promise. They will be ready to cripple or to check protectionism. 



100 A DEMOCRAT IN BARNES T. 

They will propose lower percentages of theft. But they will 
not consent to the destruction of the principle itself. 

The error of the protective tariff is inherent and fundamen- 
tal, as the error of slavery was. It cannot be tolerated even 
in a small way, as slavery could not be tolerated in a small way. 
A little robbery is as obnoxious in principle as a large robbery, 
exactly as a little slavery was as obnoxious in principle as much 
slavery. If one man may be taxed a small amount for the benefit 
of another man the motive and the excuse will be always on hand 
to increase the imposition. If slavery had been left untouched in 
some districts, or if the blacks had been retained in bondage a 
part of the time and left free a part of the time, the latent spirit of 
injustice would have asserted itself in a demand for more territory 
and longer periods of serfdom. As these states could not remain 
half free and half slave, so now the people, all equal before the 
law, cannot much longer maintain toward each other the relation- 
ship of oppressor and oppressed. The conflict of ideas is irrecon- 
cilable. Protectionism must go. It is not enough that some of it 
shall go. It must go to the remotest fiber, and the principle itself 
must be made hateful to the people whom it has deceived and 
plundered. 

The democrat in earnest who is to apply the knife to this defi- 
ant error need have no misgivings as to the result. If he shall 
lose friends and supporters he will gain them also. For every . 
timid or corrupt man who turns back a hundred valiant champions 
of right will spring to his side. The surly sophistry of greed can- 
not make headway against the growing multitude intolerant of 
wrongdoing. Old men clinging tenaciously to ancient errors and 
croaking warnings against the noblest impulses of a just and gen- 
erous people cannot intimidate the youth of the land whose uncor- 
rupted nature has been stirred to its depths by the mockery and 
the iniquity of a system at once cruel, repulsive and dangerous. 
The moral sense of the country has revolted against the colossal 
bribery and the undoubted injustice of a policy which has been 
temporized with too long. To be a democrat in earnest from this 
day forth is to be filled with an invincible determination that 



A DEMOCRAT IN EARNEST. 101 

America shall be purged through and through of the infamy that 
gives the lie to its boasted liberty, equality and fraternity. 

The men who linger hesitatingly over the well-worn columns 
of figures and the fumbled tables of statistics showing the measure 
of national dishonor and individual disgrace have had their day. 
The men who dare to do right and who do not hesitate to face the 
consequences, whatever they may be, are here to meet the emer- 
gency and to follow to their remotest conclusion the dictates of 
honor and of truth. 



oMMi^ 




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